Do we need version specific tags for distributions?

Question

I will start by saying, yes, there are cases where it will be relevant for the question asked, right. But are those weird, rare cases reason enough to overcome the drawbacks of having them in first place?

What drawbacks? you may ask, well:

• First of all, those tags are often misapplied, and by often I mean almost always. People don't even know when distributions tags are relevant for their questions, we can't expect them to apply the version ones correctly. This is one reason the almighty Thor Shog describes in his recipe to remove tags:

  2. Does the tag add any meaningful information to the post?
  This covers a pretty big range of issues, from folks typing complete sentences into the tag entryfield causing useless tags to be applied, to folks just going overboard and applying once-reasonable tags to questions where it is only tangentially-relevant, to folks just finding two different terms for the same concept and using both of them. I'll usually start by looking at the "related tags" sidebar: there should be a few tags listed, but if any of them are synonyms then they should be merged; if that's not the case, then I'll start looking through questions to see how many of them are actually about the concept represented by the tag (which I should have a basic understanding of after step #1). If the tag is superfluous on the vast majority of questions where it is used, then it should go.

  (the bold + italics is the relevant part)

• Second, which is related to the first, whenever a tag gets misapplied following the above precept, it creates overhead on users that should be doing something more important. This wastes time of users which have to go against the tide just to remove these from the post where it's irrelevant.

• Third, and probably more important, these tags more often than not displace relevant ones. This is probably the most harmful effect of those tags, since they literally prevent the experts on certain topic from ever finding the questions they can answer.

So, is there some positive case where the benefit of having these tags (all of them) is greater than the losses it produce?

Answer 1

No.

Our question volume is pretty low. Our most used distro tag (debian) got four questions in the last 24h. Our 2nd most used (ubuntu) got two. Things where this might make a little sense, like rhel got zero question in the last 24h.

It's hard to see that overwhelming our Debian or Ubuntu experts. And our RHEL experts must have fallen asleep at the keyboard by now. OTOH, if we add a bunch of version-specific tags, it'll either require putting the general tag on as well (wasting one of five tag slots) or alternatively said experts to follow additional tags.

Not to mention, being an expert in Debian Wheezy, but having no clue about Squeeze, has got to be pretty rare.

Answer 2

I can't really think of any great reasons, for example one might ask how to add a service to boot in RHEL 7, this seems approriate for a RHEL 7 tag because it moved to systemd, but the reality is that this should be 2 questions, "how can I determine what init system I'm using?" and "how can I add a service to boot with init system X?" because using systemd applies to more than rhel, and in some systems you could swap them. Also rolling distro's are versionless, and so versions don't really apply well to them. I also suspect most people would follow distro tag and not distro-x.x

Answer 3

I don't remember ever seeing a post where the version tag was useful. Some questions are specific to a distribution (or, technically speaking, to a distribution and its derivatives) or a small set of distributions. Some questions are specific to a range of versions in a distribution. But to a specific version? Sure, that happens very occasionally, but it isn't such a useful case to warrant a tag.

There's no such thing as expertise in Ubuntu 12.10 as opposed to all other versions. A tag like ubuntu-12.10 isn't useful to search in, as many issues that apply to Ubuntu 12.10 also apply to other versions and so will only have the ubuntu tag — or only nautilus or bash or whatever because the question is about a specific version of a specific piece of software, not about a specific version of the distribution.

If anyone has an example of at least two questions that are about a specific version of a specific distributions, let them speak now or forever hold their peace.

Answer 4

I remove these tags pretty regularly on new questions and encourage others to do the same when you are sure something is not a distro specific issue (and as you point out Braiam, more often than not it isn't). Sometimes I'll add a comment to that effect.

I think that may have a positive effect in demonstrating to people the extent to which linux issues are linux issues and not my-fav-distro issues. That's not a good reason to have the tags, obviously, but it does mean this is not a total loss, communication/dissemination/organization wise.

One of the most common confusions for new users seems to be conflating a specific DE with a specific distro. That can be corrected by swapping tags and leaving a comment. It's no harder to do than casting the first close vote (wink wink), so I don't see a problem with making this a "recommended practice" here.

Although I agree the tags are mostly misused, I don't agree with eliminating them. I think there are questions where they may be appropriate. I went through the newest questions tagged fedora and removed the tag from the first two, and then hit this one. While the solution may prove to be about components that are not unique to fedora (e.g., systemd) or that could have a more specific tag of their own (e.g., in this case, plymouth; I did this with firewalld for one of the other questions), it may also likely describe a phenomenon involving the interaction of components in a way that is unique to the distro, or at least, unique enough that it reoccurs. That's important, because using the distro tag now makes it much easier for other people to find the question in combination with the other tag (login), potentially saving us from dupe after dupe.

I do think the distro-x.x tags should go and have their questions reassigned to distro as they hamper searching. If there's a recurrent issue on Fedora 18, 19, and 20, and someone tags it fedora19, that's just a hassle. In this case, the excessive misuse and limited legitimate value justify the erasure.