Re: eww

[Stefan Monnier]

>     Nothing at all.  This problem with etags exists already with many other
>     macros and noone cares.
> Are you sure no one cares?

I guess that's a rhetorical question, since you seem to care, and
obviously I can't be sure anyway.

> When people look for a tag, and it isn't defined, they will hunt
> around and find it somehow.

As stated it's part of etags's problems, and it's true for uses of etags
with any language that provides a macro facility, AFAIK.  etags probably
also suffers from similar problems (missed tags) in various other corner
cases even for language without macros.

People who care enough about these issues probably just use something
else than etags.  Otherwise we'd already have had plenty more bug reports
along these lines.

> These problems are sloppinesses, and we can avoid them by taking a little
> care in defining the macros, or by making etags recognize them specially.

I wouldn't call it "a little care defining the macro" but rather
"disfiguring the macro".

> It's bad in define-derived-mode, too.  It's unfortunate
> that there is no tag for `...-mode-map'.

It's not just ..-mode-map, but also ..-abbrev-table, ..-syntax-table,
and ..-mode-hook.

> However, at least the presence of `mode' will suggest to people where
> they should look.  There is no comparable word in `web-alternatives'
> to suggest where to look.

My guess is that they'll do `C-h v web-alternatives' then click on the
button to jump to the source code, and ... tadaa!!
No problem with etags because they didn't need to use etags for that.

> We could make find-tag know about these cases, so it will find
> the tags anyway.

`find-tag' works for dozens of different languages.  Why should it
suddenly be uglified with special hacks for one of those languages (and
one where etags is particularly less important because this one language
happens to be the one that's only edited from Emacs where things like
`C-h v' and `C-h f' work even more reliably than etags and without
having to build and update any TAGS table)?

> That won't even make tag tables do it.

If we want find-tag to do the right thing, the right way to do it is by
teaching `etags' to recognizes macros like define-derived-mode and add
corresponding entries in the TAGS file.


        Stefan