Re: Bug Report (Feature request?) etags (GNU Emacs 21.1)

[David Masterson]

>>>>> Eli Zaretskii writes:

>> From: David Masterson <dmaster@synopsys.com>
>> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
>> Date: 19 Feb 2002 10:13:53 -0800

>> Again, in large projects, you might run a recursive etags in a
>> directory and accidently pick up both.  Given the size of the
>> project, it may be sometime before you realize it.  It can be
>> worked around, but it can be annoying.

> In a large project, you can have multiple tags even without the
> issue we are discussing.  For example, imagine a source tree from
> which you produce programs that target different architectures.

True.  I was giving one example that occurred to me.  Typically (but
not always!), these are generated into separate directory trees which
you can avoid in your etags run.

> IMHO we shouldn't ask etags to solve all that mess, just because
> lazy programmers didn't.  There's always "C-u M-.".

Yeah, but that can be annoying just on the cases where find-tag gets
the wrong tag in the usual sense.  It would be great if you could give
hints to find-tag to help it improve its matching along the way (but
that's another issue).  I think my suggestion of "--ignore-gen-file"
is relatively easy.  Simply match the line against the given regexp
and kick the file out if it matches.

This is not always an issue of "lazy" programmers -- sometimes it's
conflicting styles of development and problem "ownership" in the team
(politics).

-- 
David Masterson                dmaster AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA