Re: Adding support for xref jumping to headers/interfaces

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 05/03/2023 08:11, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 5 Mar 2023 00:24:01 +0200
> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii<eliz@gnu.org>,rms@gnu.org,fgunbin@fastmail.fm,
> >   casouri@gmail.com,sbaugh@janestreet.com,emacs-devel@gnu.org,
> >   azeng@janestreet.com
> > From: Dmitry Gutov<dgutov@yandex.ru>
> >
> > Now, the next question is will we be able to provide some implementation
> > of this method using one of the default backends?
> >
> > elisp -- probably not.
> >
> > Can we have one for 'etags'? Even if we just limit it to a pre-defined
> > set of languages?
> For C-like languages, we'd need to run "etags --declarations" on *.h
> files for that, I think.  And the resulting TAGS table will have stuff
> other than just declarations, so we'd need some way of distinguishing
> between them and the rest.
>
> Alternatively, perhaps it should be possible to add a special
> command-line option (--declarations-only ?) to etags, to cause it to
> output tags only for declarations.

The etags xref backend usually works with pre-generated tags files. So a 
way to distinguish between them and the rest would be best.

With the second approach, I suppose we'd have to have some new naming 
convention for tags files (like TAGS and TAGS.decl), and load two of 
them automatically.

If the feature is useful enough to go to all this trouble, of course.