Re: etags name collision.

[Ergus]

On Tue, Apr 12, 2022 at 05:29:50PM +0300, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> On 12.04.2022 16:45, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> > What I think I said was that ctags has a standardized format by POSIX,
> > this is what Emacs ctags (and BSD ctags) output; Exuberant ctags does
> > not output this format.
>
> Wikipedia says:
>
> Extended Ctags
> This is the format used by Vim's Exuberant Ctags and Universal Ctags. 
> These programs can generate an original ctags file format or an 
> extended format that attempts to retain backward compatibility.
>
> Universal Ctags's manual says:
>
> u-ctags, e-ctags u-ctags is the default output format extending the 
> Exuberant Ctags output format
> (e-ctags).
> --format=1 and --format=2 are same as --output-format=e-ctags and
> --output-format=u-ctags respectively.
> See man page tags (5) for details. The difference between u-ctags and 
> e-ctags are marked as “EX-
> CEPTION”. Additional changes in Universal Ctags are described in 
> Changes to the tags file format.
>
> Somebody should experiment with the --format flag, but if there is 
> indeed no option for the original format, 
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctags should be updated.

Hi Dmitry:

The Universal ctags manual says:

--format=(1|2)
       Change the format of the output tag file. Currently the only
       valid values for level are 1 or 2. Level 1 specifies the original
       tag file format and level 2 specifies a new extended format
       containing extension fields (but in a manner which retains
       backward-compatibility with original vi(1) implementations). The
       default level is 2.  [Ignored in etags mode]

So if this 1 doesn't generate a vi compatible format it is not a
wikipedia issue, it is an issue to report.  As I said before, After a
basic test with my limited vi knowledge the format is compatible (and
BTW it worked out of the box with zero effort configuring vi.)