I have never really figured out if there was any way to restrict the tag files that are used. I don't invoke the compiler through SE so I never considered the compiler options. I edit in SE and then switch over to Code Composer Studio to compile and debug. I just used the tag files for code navigation (Find Reference, Go To Definition, etc).
That said, I have created additional tag files, per project, in the past as I mentioned before but I abandoned that because really it is not an issue 99% of the time. SE always automatically tags the project code files and that is usually sufficient.
See the attached text file for some examples of my project includes.
I have about 20 TI projects that I work on and a few Freescale projects as well. Some of those will use the same compiler version, some won't. The same is true for the OS.
So, how I see it, is there would be a tag file for MSP430 compiler 4.21, and a tag file for MSP430 compiler version 4.22, etc. The same would be true for the DSP\BIOS OS. A tag file for DSP\BIOS 5.42.01.09, a file for 5.41.04.18, and file for 5.31.02, etc.
Then when I create a project from the source files, I can just hook in the additional correct tag files. Maybe the way to hook them in is in the compiler settings? I have tried just adding the directory trees for the OS, libs, & compiler to the project before but that was kind of messy. 99% of the time I am just making changes that are relegated to the target project code.
Like I mentioned before, this issue with it finding the definitions in Visual Studio happens rarely but it does happen. Further, occasionally SE can't find a definition for the OS because I gave up on creating those tag files per project and never really knew how to force SE to limit the scope to just those files.
Let me reiterate though that it really doesn't impact my work much. But, I figured that maybe I am missing some easy configuration that already exists and then I could use SE more correctly.
Jim
PS: I think I used "in is in" in a grammatically correct way, Cool. ;-).