Re: etags.el tags-search use global syntax table

[Richard Stallman]

    The the major mode does matter for searching, in fact it's often 
    critical for correct searching. There are two key things a major mode 
    does which affects searching, it establishes a syntax and often defines 
    the value of case-fold-search.

I am concerned that making etags invoke all major modes
might lead to a substantial slowdown (as it did in the past).
We could try it and see.  If it does, the best thing to do
would be to indicate somehow which modes really need to be selected
during tags search.

    The novisit behavior 
    has another down side to my thinking as well, the buffer is not 
    available in the buffer list unless a match was found. This makes for an 
    odd and arbitrary set of buffers. My preference is to have all buffers 
    which participated in the search to be available.

I strongly disagree.