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At least one person objects to making a synonym of . Why?

Solaris in everyday speech means SunOS versions 5.0 and above. (Officially, it means 4.0 and above as the last BSD major release, SunOS 4, was retroactively branded Solaris 1.) The last release of SunOS 4.x was 19 years ago, and support for it ended 10 years ago. Not a single question on the site is about such old versions (I think the oldest Solaris release mentioned in a question is 8).

So we don't need a tag to mean “SunOS when it was a BSD”, and the tags “Any of the two incarnations of SunOS” and “SVR4-based SunOS” cover exactly the same question. This is increasingly unlikely to change as time progresses.

It is natural to use the tag for recent releases of Solaris, since that's the name uname -s displays.

Why then should not be a synonym of ?

Given the unusually wide support and lack of opposition to this meta question, I say make it a synonym.

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    Personally, I don't see any problems with it. It's not exactly like there's going to be somebody subscribed to SunOS that is going to fly into a rage if they have to look at questions pertaining to recent platform versions (or vice versa). Keeping them separate would actually seem to only fragment the support base should someone come in with a relevant question (i.e the person who would have answered the question, also thought subscribing to "sunos" was good enough and didn't know "Solaris" was a different tag).
    – Bratchley
    Commented Jul 5, 2013 at 13:17
  • According to Sun, SunOS was the kernel, while Solaris was the whole system.
    – reinierpost
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 14:22

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I think you are correct @Gilles. Your logic is correct and easy to follow. If I had enough reputation points to make those two tags synonyms, I would.

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