On Mon, 19 Apr 2010 19:51:04 +0200 Enrico Tröger enrico.troeger@uvena.de wrote:
parser must care about buffer VS file, wouldn't it be good to abstract this a little more? (with e.g. a little I/O layer - I already started a small library to check if it would be easy to emulate file I/O on buffer, and it seems not to be too hard)
Yeah, that would be a clean and proper solution and would probably solve a lot of problems. But before doing this, we need to decide whether we want to stay as compatible as possible with the CTags project(which makes very slow progress, almost dead) as we did before or whether we would spend time on modernising the parsers and adjust them to work more like we need it (not sure how many differences there would be at all though).
Once this decision is made, we can think about your question above about an I/O abstracting layer.
Yeah. I might say if it is so dead, it is hope not so far from blindness to wait for updates and fixes from it. But OTHO I completely understand that the simple idea of being the maintainer of it might be quite... scary.
That's the question for now, I guess. If we decide to not try to stay compatible with CTags we maybe could adjust the parsers more easily to fit our needs, especially to read data from a buffer and we could easily use GLib functions in the parsers which could make the code a bit easier and other things. From what I noticed (mainly reading svn log of the CTags repository), it sees a few commits every few weeks or months mostly with fixes but no real progress. I think we could go away and push our tagmanager copy into our direction but OTOH it might be not even worth. Not sure.
What about the others, any opinions?
I think we should try to stay fairly compatible with CTags as other projects use it also and may make improvements to their copies.
But IMO it's OK to change the I/O functions.
Regards, Nick