Re: etags test is broken on MS-Windows

[Paul Eggert]

On 05/21/2015 12:54 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Yes, they would, but it's not fatal, since etags.el searches around
> the position for the pattern stated on the tag line.
>
> And of course, in the case you present, the byte counts will be
> slightly off on Windows as well.
>
> But the way etags works currently, a file with all of its lines ending
> in CRLF will_always_  have all of its byte counts messed up.  Not a
> catastrophe, either, but still worse than under my suggestion.

I don't see why it's worth our trouble to substitute one incorrect 
solution for another, if it's OK that the solutions are approximate.

If it's important to fix this, how about the following idea instead.  
Have etags always compute byte offsets the POSIX way, counting any CRs, 
and put POSIX-oriented byte counts into the TAGS file (the way it 
already does on GNU hosts).  When Emacs starts up, if the source file is 
in DOS mode (with CRLF replaced by LF internally), Emacs subtracts the 
line count from the POSIX byte count, and uses the resulting byte count 
instead. That way, we don't need to change how etags works on GNU 
platforms, nor do we need to tell GNU users to regenerate their TAGS files.