On Mon, 23 Nov 2009, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
< TAGS files are very valuable -- I don't understand the objections that
< several people have had to them. On the other hand, I don't see the
< point of distributing them with Maxima when they can easily be
< recreated.
What I would like to do is:
-put in the Maxime code base the scripts and etags regexps to create the
TAGS files and the lookup info table, along with a Maxima function to call
these scripts (the Maxima function will be flexible enough so the user
can tag his own code);
-re-write parts of the online help so that a user can search from any
number of lookup tables for documentation (with the default being the
two tables already distributed).
Further along, I want to automate the creation of 'maxima-font-lock.el'
and 'builtins-list.txt' so that these have an up-do-date symbol list
(the regexps in maxima-mode also need to be cleaned up). I'd also like
to add a function to regenerate the existing TAGS files to maxima-mode.
< The main challenge is assembling the list of files to be
< tagged, which will probably be different for different applications
< (include both Lisp and Maxima sources? include contrib as well as main
< share?).
Concerning which files ought to be tagged, this can be handled in
standard ways: a conf file, command-line options and sensible defaults.
It isn't so hard to re-write the script so that it tags only source
files matching (or not matching) a given regexp. Similarly, we can
ensure only a subset of symbols in a given source file are tagged.
One thing that has impressed me is that, barring a few outliers, the
naming conventions in the source are quite consistent. This makes for
easy searching, and means one needn't be two worried about unnecessary
flights through a gazillion extraneous files.
Leo
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