I wanted to ask when the tag download should be used?
To me it seems to be a rather useless tag since in the 150 question nearly half seem to be about wget and the other half about curl.
And some are about downloading distros.
So what is the purpose of download?
I don't see a need for it; who is out there looking for questions to answer about "downloads"? I think there would be a piece of software involved (wget, curl, etc) that could be tagged, instead.
I can only see two valid question types with that tag:
Connectivity problems with tools that perform downloads. Example: question about RHEL packages without connectivity. Should probably be tagged with the piece of software used (rpm in the example question).
Question concerning operation on files that are still incomplete due to the fact that they're being operated on. This is a little harder, I believe:
This question about monitoring the downloads directory would be as valid if, instead of firefox, curl or wget was used (let's imagine that it is some wget process running in the background).
And this question about uploading a file that is being generated is also independent of the program used for the upload/download. Moreover OP is asking what program he can use to perform the upload/download.
Notably, the last example question (just above) would be poorer without the download. On the other hand it is arguable that download is a poor definition for what OP is looking for. He is actually looking for a file-transfer. The same can be said about the question on download monitoring.
In my humble opinion download should be synonymized to file-transfer.
[Playing Devil's Advocate to Jeff Schaller's answer for voting purposes; I haven't actually looked up the tag itself]
I see a need for it; I often see someone asking a question to help them use a command-line tool to "download" something [usually scraping; occasionally something more interesting]. There may be a piece of software involved (wget, curl, etc.) that is mistakenly tagged, instead, but the questioner doesn't actually care about the minutiae of that software but just wants to learn how to download something.
I believe the download tag is meant for downloads that aren't wget, curl, and the like. However, it's being mis-used, and so wget and curl questions have the tag on them. My solution, is if there are already wget and curl tags, move those questions to them. Alternatively, we could just delete download altogether.
What if someone wants to generally look for a download, and not just wget or curl? Then, download seems useful. No, wgetcurl is not a correct search term, what if a new tool gets added?
