temporary tags file into cache dir

[Konfekt]

Hey, thanks for the closure that gutentags brought to us Vim taggers.

How about generating the temporary tag files, such as tags.lock, into ta $XDG_CACHE_HOME/tags folder ? (If set up by the user.)

While there are good reasons to leave the tag files in the project root, I don't see many for the temporary tag files.

[ludovicchabant]

Hey, thanks for using it :)

Did you know you can hide both the tag file and the temp/lock file away by setting g:gutentags_cache_dir? Or do you actually want the tag file in the project root, but not the temp one?

[Konfekt]

Yep, I discovered this option but stay safe and keep the tag file in the project root but suggest only moving the temp lock file that sometimes ends up in my project root when Vim crashes.

By the way, with the former option, you tell Vim about the gutentags cache dir by adding it to the vim tagpath option, that's how it works?

[Konfekt]

Thinking about it, There's also a temp folder under Windows, perhaps there's an analog under Unix as well?

[ludovicchabant]

You specify the cache dir just by setting that value in your vimrc:

let g:gutentags_cache_dir = "~/whatever/tmp"

But yeah, I could save the lock file by default in the OS' temp directory instead of next to the tag file. I'll look into it.

[nogweii]

Using the $TMP or $TMPDIR environment variables might be enough for most OS's. (While still allowing an override via g:gutentags_cache_dir.)

[Konfekt]

The temp paths are listed in the default value set backupskip&?.

[ludovicchabant]

Mmmh backupskip only lists file patterns... I'd have to parse that to remove the wildcards and stuff... did you mean backupdir?

[Konfekt]

Hmm, true that these are Vim file patterns. that's why I asked about https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/vim_use/NXFksN223bc

But it's rather meant as inspiration regading the system's default temp folder. It defaults to

'backupskip' 'bsk'  string  (default: "/tmp/*,$TMPDIR/*,$TMP/*,$TEMP/*")

[ludovicchabant]

I thought about this thing some more and I prefer keeping the temp files next to the tags file. When it goes well, you don't notice anything, and when it goes bad, it makes it a lot easier to cleanup or troubleshoot stuff (finding a specific file in the OS's temp dirs is really painful).

Of course, if anybody with more free time than me want to submit a pull request that adds the option, I'll gladly merge it, but in the meantime I'll close this.

[Konfekt]

Okay, to achieve that using tempname() instead of .tags.temp should suffice.