Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 92257
ctags should use alternatives
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:31 EST
This was filed against emacs (bug #92256), but it would also require a rebuild of the vim package to support /etc/alternatives etags from emacs is apparently inferior to ctags from vim, except that many systems (including the ones my engineers used to work on) have etags pointing to vim's ctags. Right now, I need to repoint /usr/bin/etags to vim's ctags. I'm going to do mv etags etags.emacs, ln -s ctags etags This is all nice and great, except that the next emacs upgrade is going to blow my symlink away. Of course, rpm should account for something like this, like I would do on debian with dpkg-divert etags etags.divert, but in the meantime, we can at least repackage emacs and vim so that /usr/bin/etags is a symlink to /etc/alternatives, like it is on debian. gandalf:~$ l /usr/bin/etags lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 23 Aug 13 2002 /usr/bin/etags -> /etc/alternatives/etags* gandalf:~$ l /etc/alternatives/etags lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Aug 13 2002 /etc/alternatives/etags -> /usr/bin/ctags-exuberant*
Using alternatives for etags is fine. (But AFAIK etags and ctags are not compatible at all so symlinking etags to a ctags doesn't make much sense to me.)
I think you mean *ctags* "from emacs is apparently inferior to ctags from" from ctags. <nod/> And the one in xemacs too... So why do we need alternatives for ctags?
Because it is better to have emacs's ctags than none?
An alternative might be just not to ship ctags in emacs at all... Currently we don't ship the xemacs one.
Then again (sorry for so many comments), perhaps this has changed but I noticed this comment in emacs.spec: * Fri Feb 07 1997 Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm@redhat.com> - Moved ctags to gctags to fit in the more powerful for C (but less general) exuberant ctags as the binary /usr/bin/ctags and the man page /usr/man/man1/ctags.1 If this is still the case, we should probably use alternatives for ctags too...
Actually that comment seems to completely out of date. Additionally I note that adding alternatives to ctags is non-trivial since rpm will delete the alternatives link when upgrading from an older ctags package...