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Renaming GNU/Linux tag to gnu
I have noticed that we have several questions tagged with GNU/Linux.
I would like to rename this tag to gnu to reflect what seems to be the canonical name and also be consistent with tag naming (all letters are lowercase, avoid slashes).
Based on provided answers, I know consider the following alternatives:
- gnu-linux
- linux
Note: GNU/Linux naming is controversial enough to have its own Wikipedia article
2 answers
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I don't think GNU can be used as a stand-alone tag.
Apart from the OS, GNU is also a tool collection of various programs, many used for programming, making is a very ambiguous tag which can't stand on its own. Any use of the tag needs to also specify what it's actually about: the OS or one of the tools. And in that case we might as well drop the GNU tag since it doesn't add much meaningful info - tagging something as for example "GNU" and "gcc" would be redundant and the GNU tag fills no purpose there.
On Someplace Else I believe they use the tags "linux" meaning "GNU/Linux", and "linux-kernel", meaning the the kernel part. And any non-Linux distro would have its own tag from there.
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All three obvious current possibilities are problematic, but for different reasons.
Ignoring the matter of how to format the tag name for a moment...
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GNU/Linux focuses on one (admittedly very important) part of the userland, plus the kernel, while ignoring other (also important) parts of the userland.
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Linux technically refers only to the kernel, which is often relatively inconsequential unless you're actually writing kernel code, or code that interacts directly with the kernel, but that's not how the term is used colloquially.
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GNU again ignores the non-GNU portions of the userland.
GNU also has the obvious issue that it could, perhaps more accurately, refer to GNU/Hurd; which is a GNU userland running on the Hurd kernel. There has also been, for example, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD which substituted the FreeBSD kernel for the Linux kernel but otherwise behaved fairly similarly from a userland perspective.
Looking at the questions which are currently tagged GNU/Linux:
- cpulimit and sensors
- Tools for debugging coredumps
- How to manage user-specific application data on Linux?
only one of them seems like it obviously might really be relevant to the kernel proper.
Most of the time when people say "Linux" what they really mean is either a more generic *nix or POSIX ("how do I do X on Linux?" rather than "how do I do X using tools available on POSIX-compliant systems?"), or a more specific single distribution ("I'm running Linux" rather than "I'm running Ubuntu").
Maybe what's needed is actually something more along the lines of a split between, say, linux-kernel and unixlike-userland?
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