Re: [gedit-list] resurrecting ctags plugin

[Frederic Back <fredericback gmail com>]

On Thu, 2006-11-30 at 13:40 +0100, Jesse van den Kieboom wrote: 
> My idea (in global terms) was:
> - take ctags parsers and clean them up/objectify them to allow 
>   better integration into applications.
> - provide symbol lookup
> - provide symbol updates in the background
> - provide a way for the application to do autocompletion
> - etc.
> 
> This is a lot of work, but would benefit so many. All editors
> (monodevelop, anjuta) all use their own implementations of the same
> concept. A library to do all this in general would be great. Let me know
> if anyone is interested.

Hi Jesse,

I am interested, although I don't fully agree with the above list.

I can't object to the actual parser implementation of ctags. In my
opinion, allowing data input from textbuffers and data output as a
liststore of a new tag class would be sufficient to make it usable.
After reviewing the ctags code, both don't seem too difficult to
implement.

Moreover, maintaining the compatibility to the ctags parsers seems to me
to be of crucial importance: There are _many_ of them, and rewriting
them in an objectified manner seems inappropriate considering the
limited amount of time most developers would be willing to invest in
such a project.

The biggest issue for me is getting ctags to compile as a library. The
autoconf and makefile gibberish in ctags is foreign to me, and I don't
have the time or the will to learn autotools better.

In short, I'd participate in such a project, but I'm unsure if we should
discuss this here. Wouldn't the ctags developer mailing list be a better
place for planning this?

Cheers,
Fred

PS: The reply took quite a while, but I had to make up my mind before
getting entangled in ctags :-)