Re: Easy configuration of a site-lisp directory

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Clément Pit-Claudel <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2021 18:14:46 -0400
> 
> > Why is that a problem for you?  M-. takes you to the code you are
> > actually running, 
> 
> No, I'm running from .elc files, am I not?  Not from .el.gz ones.

You are also running native machine code, not the C source files.  And
yet you want M-. to show you the C source code, not the disassembly of
the machine instructions.  Same with *.el.gz files: they are the exact
_source_code_ of what you are running.

> > whereas the files in Git could have been modified
> > meanwhile, and are no longer the code your installed Emacs runs.
> 
> Yep, that's precisely why I wrote "Though the .el files could be out of sync 
> with the .el.gz files, presumably."  But the same issue exists with the C 
> files, which could be out of date as well.

In the case of C sources there's no alternative if you install from
the Git checkout (as opposed to from a source tree produced by
unpacking the tarball).  At the time, some people argued for
installing the C sources at "make install" time, which I think would
be taking things too far.  Especially as installing allows you to
delete the source tree, in which case there would be no TAGS to
support M-. anyway.

> >   . run 'etags' to produce TAGS that names the *.el files in the Git
> >     checkout where you want to go
> > 
> >   . configure Xref to use etags for ELisp files (instead of the
> >     built-in ELisp backend)
> 
> Thanks.  Is there a way to do that only for Emacs source files, not for all 
> ELisp files?

The beauty of TAGS is that you control what will be in it: by
specifying the file names to be submitted to the 'etags' program.
Only what you submit to it will be in TAGS.