Etags and included files
Hi,
I've been unable to find any reference to the problem I'm having with
etags and included files, so I'm forced to assume, strange as it might
seem, that I am actually the first one to report this problem.
To summarize: Attempting to use 'find-tag' fails with the error message
"Bad TAGS
file" if the TAGS file being read includes other TAGS files (by using
etags -i).
A TAGS file created with the etags -i option may look like this:
^L
config.h,418
#define TIME_WITH_SYS_TIME 14,445
#define PACKAGE 56,1501
#define VERSION 59,1556
^L
src/TAGS,include
^L
tests/TAGS,include
As soon as the 2nd ^L is processed, the error will occur. The reason is
that the regexp being used to match a valid file specification after the
^L expects a number after the comma, and does not accept the 'include'.
The regexp is defined in /usr/lib/xemacs-21.4.1/lisp/etags.el.gz, line
478, as:
(defconst tags-file-pattern "^\f\n\\(.+\\),[0-9]+\n")
defining it instead as:
(defconst tags-file-pattern
"^\f\n\\(.+\\),\\(\\([0-9]+\\)\\|include\\)\n")
would handle the include pattern as well. At least, that works for me.
Funny, the line right after this says:
;; #### Should make it work with the `include' directive!
(defun add-to-tag-completion-table ()
So apparently it was known as a problem to the author of that line, but
he or she didn't want to fix it by changing 'tags-file-pattern', so
perhaps there's some underlying issue I'm not aware of. I'm not an
ELisp hacker, I just traced it in the debugger and saw that it was
crapping out apparently only because the input wasn't matching this
regexp, but what do I know.
The TAGS file that caused the problem was originally created as a result
of running 'make tags' on a Makefile built from automake/autoconf, so I
would think this would be a common problem.
I'm running XEmacs 21.4 (patch 1) "Copyleft" [Lucid] (i386-debian-linux,
Mule) of Tue May 22 2001 on eeyore
configured using `configure --with-sound=native --with_menubars=lucid
--with_scrollbars=lucid --with_dialogs=athena '--cflags=-O2 -g -Wall '
--with-x11 --extra-verbose --with-site-lisp --statedir=/var/lib
--infodir=/usr/share/info/xemacs-21.4.1 --prefix=/usr
--error-checking=none --debug=no --const-is-losing=no --dynamic
--without-postgresql --with-gpm=no
--docdir=/usr/lib/xemacs-21.4.1/i386-debian-linux/mule/ --with-mule
--with-canna=no --with-wnn=no --with-xim=xlib --with-xfs
'--package-path=~/.xemacs:~/.xemacs/packages::/usr/share/xemacs21/packages:/usr/share/xemacs21/mule-packages:/usr/share/xemacs21/site-packages'
i386-debian-linux'
I am running debian woody/testing, kernel 2.4.1 on i686. Running 'etags
-V' outputs "etags (GNU Emacs 21.4.1)".
=wl
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