Tag cleanup: time vs time-utility

Question

It seems to me that we have two "time utility" tags -- time and time-utility. There are 8 questions in time-utility and 209 in time.

The time-utility tag had no wiki, so I just now suggested an edit to make it look the same as time's.

I see there have been recent edits to questions that were tagged time that were retagged as time-utility.

What do you think about merging the time and time-utility tags? Is this a situation where tag-synonyms would be helpful?

I'm willing to help clean up, I just wanted to head in the "right" direction.

Answer 1

time is an ambiguous tag. It's used to mean several things, at least:

• The time utility and shell builtin. These are sufficiently close to use the same tag: time-utility. Examples: 1 2
• Measuring the execution time of a program. This is often but not always done with the time utility (like parallelism ≠ gnu-parallel and scripting ≠ shell). Examples: 1 2
• Computing, parsing or formatting dates and times. There should be a single tag encompassing dates and times as they make a whole. See also How about a [date-manipulation] tag or redefine the [date] tag?. Examples: 1 2 3
• Working with file timestamps. We have timestamps for that. Example: 1 2
• What time it is, i.e. reading or setting a clock. That's what clock is for. Examples: 1 2 3
• Timezone issues, which should be tagged timezone. Example: 1 2

While some question touch more than one topic (e.g. display a file's timestamp in a certain format), these are all distinct topics that tags would help sort out, so we should get rid of the ambiguous tags date and time and use more specific tags instead.

Answer 2

Here's one possibility, just to kick things off:

• Re-tag all 209 'time' questions to 'time-utility' then make time a synonym of time-utility.