Re: Up for adoption: ctags and expat

[Frank Fesevur <ffes@users.sourceforge.net>]

2016-08-12 10:11 GMT+02:00 Corinna Vinschen:
> Given the obvious lack of upstream development, did anybody try
> to replace exuberant ctags with universal ctags?
>
>   https://ctags.io/
>
> I noticed that our co-maintainer Frank Fesevur is involved in this
> project.  Frank, any insight?

I have been active in the development of universal ctags, but at the
moment not too much.

Universal ctags is the continuation of exuberant ctags. We have tried
to convince Darren Hiebert (the original author of exuberant) to team
up so we could keep the name. But that didn't work out, so we had to
fork and came up with the name universal.

My main reason to help out was to make sure it kept working on native
Windows. I use ctags for a Notepad++ plugin I wrote.

I have successfully compile universal ctags for cygwin a while ago and
it worked. Not sure how it is at the moment. There have been some
changes in the build files so not sure if cygwin still works. Pull
request are always reviewed.

Among many other improvements, universal ctags has more and better
parsers. You can add your own parser with an external program or with
regexs. You can write the output as JSON.

There hasn't been any official release. ATM there is no-one working on
that. Making all the docs up-to-date with all the development that has
been going on is the biggest task.

I would say, make the switch to universal. I am willing to maintain
that package. Question is how to update a package without official
releases. And it hasn't been included in any major distro AFAIK.

Regards,
Frank