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Having just gone past the 2500 mark I took a look at the existing tags.

To my astonishment suse is mapped to sles. This is not correct (SuSE has two branches - OpenSuSE and SLES). So

  1. General question: How to get rid of false synonyms?
  2. Special question: How to get rid of that one?
  3. Additional question: Is there a way to auto-synonym branches? In this case - add SuSE to everything that is being flagged either opensuse or sles*?
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    What differences (if any) merit splitting these tags? -- More specifically If I sit down at a SLES box can it be administered the same way as OpenSuSE? (if not there may be a valid case for splitting the tags)
    – voretaq7
    Commented Jan 20, 2012 at 21:39
  • OpenSuSE is quite different from SLES in many aspects - especially when administering it.
    – Nils
    Commented Jan 20, 2012 at 21:50
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    @Nils if you don't mind for those of us less experienced with OpenSuSE/SLES differences could you name a few of the major ones for us to make the process move a bit better
    – Zypher Mod
    Commented Jan 20, 2012 at 23:28
  • I outlined one (imho important) example in the tag description for sles10: On SLES10 XEN works without problems (even running a W2K server there was no problem) while with OpenSuSE in the same constellation there were crashes even with Linux DomUs. Although both systems feature yast2 then menus and background scripts for networking and firewalling are quite different. I tried to run a few commercial apps that had a SLES clearance on OpenSuSE - crashes, missing libraries and so on. After going to SLES - no problems any more.
    – Nils
    Commented Jan 21, 2012 at 20:14
  • @voretaq7 Congrats for winning the election. So can you now help in this case?-)
    – Nils
    Commented Jan 24, 2012 at 21:54

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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Looking at some of what's in the tags and with my understanding of SuSe, at the moment I have to agree with @sysadmin1138:

We have and , which cover the differences between the two branches.
I think we can assume in our target audience ("professional" sysadmins) we'll be dealing mostly with SLES (the "enterprise" version), so the synonym makes sense to me -- in my (admittedly limited) experience when people have said SuSe they've meant SLES (usually in the context of what was supported on early IBM BladeCenters).

If other OpenSuse folks weigh in to say this is a bad synonym I could get behind blackholing entirely to eliminate any chance of confusion, but if the two branches really are different from an admin standpoint I don't think having a standalone SuSe tag is a good idea.

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  • I like the blackhole - idea. So if sysadmin1138 likes it, too - please go for it.
    – Nils
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 11:34
  • @nils The more I look at it, the more I think we don't have a case. The sles tag has 99 questions in it, the synonym caught 72 renames, which means most of the SLES tag is actually renames. Looking through the list of SLES-tagged questions, it appears to be correctly renaming things to sles 80-85% of the time. That's a low enough incorrect-rename percentage that occasionally going through the list and retagging is the preferred StackExchange method of handling this.
    – sysadmin1138 Mod
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 13:17
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The reason for creating the synonym back in the day is that the tag had over 90% of its questions about , and we had a separate tag which was specifically about the OpenSUSE product. Much like how we got rid of , a generic did not make sense as a stand-alone tag as it's more of a company name than the name of a specific product.

Which is to say, I disagree with breaking the synonym.

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  • So do you go with the blackhole-solution from voretq7?
    – Nils
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 11:32
  • @Nils It's a good idea in principle, but SE has been hesitant to blackhole tags just-because. In the 16 months since the synonym went in, it has been used 72 times. Or 4.5 times a month. The 'vmware' and 'amazon' tags (on blacklist) get exercised more then that. I don't think we have enough activity to warrant a black-list. I'll ask, though.
    – sysadmin1138 Mod
    Commented Jan 26, 2012 at 12:54
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The answer to my question #1 seems to be: Do a post in meta.

The answer to question #2 seems to be: Get a moderator to do it. (?)

About the question #3 - this seems trickier - but is probably not necessary, since there is a statistical means of correlating tags? (is this what "related" on the right side does?)

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