Update system-wide tags tables
update-otags
update-otags runs otags on the system-wide installed OCaml files (in ocamlc -where). This makes it possible to use the tag-features of vi/vim and Emacs to jump to the declarations of library functions in the system-wide installed .mli files to read the documentation that is hopefully embedded in those files.
To use the system-wide tags table in Emacs, use M-x visit-tags-table <RET> /var/lib/otags/TAGS. To load it by default, customize tags-table-list to contain /var/lib/otags (by using M-x customize-variable, for instance).
For vim use :set tags=/var/lib/otags/tags or add set tags=/var/lib/otags/tags to your .vimrc.
One would typically update the system-wide tags tables with a cron-job once per week or day.
System-wide tags table for Emacs and vi/vim.
Directory for parsing hints. Packages that install files in non-standard syntax can install a parser hints file for otags in this directory, see option -parser-hints in the otags(1) manual.
Camlp4 (and therefore otags too) cannot parse all legal OCaml sources. Most notably, camlp4 dies on pervasives.mli (see bug #5495). Therefore, none of the core library functions are tagged.
Various files in the system-wide OCaml directory are written in the revised syntax or require other syntax extensions. In principle these files can all be properly tagged, but the dumb update-otags script tries to parse all files with the original syntax.
update-otags appeared first in Debian Etch (see Debian bug #341939). It has been added to the contrib directory with an improved man page in otags 3.12.2.
Hendrik Tews <otags at askra.de>