bug#23400: Emacs 25.0.92.1: etags fails to handle file format generated by Exuberant Ctags 5.8 in etags emulation mode

[Robert Weiner]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 4:26 PM, Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> wrote:

On 04/29/2016 07:28 PM, Andreas Schwab wrote:

However, a call to list-tags fails on such a file because it includes 2
lines of file names per file rather than one.

Why is this not a bug in Exuberant Ctags?

Indeed. And Ctags 5.8 is very old.

The main Exhuberant CTags site is: http://ctags.sourceforge.net/ which shows a last released version of 5.8.  The popular `brew' package manager for OS X installs version 5.8 as the latest.

There are various forks of this code since it doesn't seem to be active anymore, but these are much harder for users to find and so many may choose V5.8 which has the issue I mentioned and patched.

There is universal-ctags (version 0, based on V5.8) which fixes the problem I listed and has a separate web page: http://ctags.io.  There is also a V5.9 fork that is included in some Linux distributions that can be found here: https://github.com/rgo/exuberant-ctags, but looks far from official.  Dmitry mentioned that this also fixes the issue.

So the issue is/was with a version of Exhuberant Ctags that is still the latest official release and the most popular Google search result.  Most users who install this software themselves would most likely only find this version.

The patch to fix the problem is simple but whether you want to apply it given all of this is left for you far more knowledgeable maintainers to decide.