On 6 Jul 2000, Chris G. Demetriou wrote:

# Date: 06 Jul 2000 23:10:35 -0700
# From: Chris G. Demetriou <cgd@sibyte.com>
# To: tech-userlevel@netbsd.org
# Subject: libc tags
# 
# Is there anybody who actually uses the libc tags database, built as
# part of the libc build and installed into /var/db/libc.tags?
# 
# As far as I can tell, we don't do anything with it other than build
# and install it, i.e. we don't bother ship default configurations of
# any tools (e.g. vi) that look up entries in it, etc.
# 
# Further, it's likely to be incorrect, since the tags db hard-wires
# whatever source tree location was used to build the system.  For
# binary releases, "who knows how the builder built it?"  For systems
# rebuilt from scratch, it may actually be sensible (assuming the
# builder didn't move the source tree).
# 
# 
# Anyway:
# 
# (1) does anybody use it?  and

YES, I use it!  vi has a ':set tags=' option that I actually make use of
while editing things looking for a particular routine.  I make extremely
wide use of tags files; not sure how I'd find out where something lives,
short of running grep on the whole tree.

# (2) i hereby propose that we nuke it: don't build it, don't install
# it, don't even provide a mechanism by which to build it.  (we don't
# for other libraries.)

Perhaps we should?  I'd *love* to see at least the ability to build,
on one's own, tags files as needed.

I guess I can stuff this in by myself, but I'd hate to have it clobbered
every time I updated my source tree.

# any comments?


				--*greywolf;
--
BSD: A drinking group with a serious computing problem.