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Should the tag be removed?

I can flag a question as off-topic with the following reason:

Questions on Server Fault must be about managing information technology systems in a business environment. […] Questions about […] development tools may be asked on Stack Overflow.

The toolset xampp is a development tool and not meant for production use. In my opinion, problems regarding configuration, etc. should be asked at stackoverflow. We should not give the impression that serverfault is the appropriate place to ask about XAMPP by providing a tag.

Tag stats serverfault: 16 followers, 206 questions
Tag stats stackoverflow: 244 followers, 5.8k questions

(The rules don't mention development tools.)

1 Answer 1

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I find your argument compelling. I'm inclined to think the tag should be removed, but first, all the questions on the tag should be Dealt With, one way or another.

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  • 4
    killall -9 xampp
    – Wesley
    Dec 14, 2015 at 21:47
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    Just as with virtualbos there are circumstances when xampp might be applicable. They will though be very rare and almost certainly don't exist already.
    – user9517
    Dec 14, 2015 at 21:54
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    @Iain Virtualbox is a virtualisation platform which is usually used for dev work (because Vagrant, and because it's utter pants). XAMPP, on the other hand, is specifically intended to be a dev environment -- the subtitle on apachefriends.org says "XAMPP is the most popular PHP development environment". It should therefore not be used in production, and questions about it either get closed "off topic - dev env" or "off topic - best practices".
    – womble Mod
    Dec 15, 2015 at 3:43
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    Strange as this may seem I am well aware of what VirtualBox and XAMPP are. If though I was a Windows admin tasked with deploying XAMPP for a group of developers then the tag may be applicable. Like I said rare but possible. I'v even argued against our support of xampp users in the past meta.serverfault.com/questions/4087/…
    – user9517
    Dec 15, 2015 at 6:19
  • @lain, In my opinion you still should ask at stackoverflow in that case. Being the admin is not the criterion, but deploying a development tool. If one has trouble with the deployment technique, he/she should use a tag to reflect that instead of what you are deploying. For example deployment. I don't want to say that one cannot put XAMPP in the title, though.
    – Daniel
    Dec 15, 2015 at 7:07
  • In my opinion you still should ask at stackoverflow in that case. - in the case that you're a sysadmin deploying XAMPP to a group of devs? That kind of question is off topic at Stack Overflow and explicitly on topic here.
    – Rob Moir
    Dec 16, 2015 at 20:54
  • If others use XAMPP for production, where do they ask questions about it? Telling them their questions are off-topic here because they're doing something they shouldn't be doing is not only arrogant, it is also wrong: even if the decision to use XAMPP is within their control, it probably isn't going to be what their question is about. Dec 23, 2015 at 15:06
  • @reinierpost if someone is using xampp in production then they are doing it wrong. It is not meant to be in production, it is an abomination to use it as such.
    – user9517
    Dec 23, 2015 at 15:19
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    @reinierpost the "bad practice" off-topic close reason is, in part, specifically for cases where you're using something in a manner contrary to the label. Do you think diy.stackexchange is going to answer construction questions involving a stale bread roll to hammer a nail? Hell no. They're first going to tell you to get a hammer.
    – womble Mod
    Dec 24, 2015 at 2:01

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