/dev/chat

Gilles

22:00

How is Moshen not answer-banned nor edit-banned yet?

derobert

@Gilles Sure. Looks like the tag needs cleaning up, though, not burninating

slm

@Gilles I figured @MichaelMrozek drew some figurative short straw

derobert

unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3423/… ← actual GNU question

unix.stackexchange.com/questions/23549/gnu-hurd-vs-gnu-linux ← another

... so there are definitely some

slm

Why not change the tag from gnu to gnu-project

derobert

unix.stackexchange.com/questions/13288/… ← that one is GNU software

terdon

22:02

Actually, looking though the gnu questions there seem to be a lot that are using it correctly.

2

Q: What are the differences between bsdtar and GNU tar?

I've always used GNU tar. However, all GNU/Linux distributions that I've seen ship bsdtar in their repositories. I've even seen it installed by default in some, IIRC. I know for sure that Arch GNU/Linux requires it as a part of basedevel (maybe base, but I'm not sure), as I've seen it in PKGBUILD...

9

Q: Is it possible to run pure GNU?

On the GNU Project webpage, there's a subsection called "All GNU packages" which lists the various software in the GNU project. Are there any GNU distributions which use only these packages -- i.e. a "pure" GNU operating system that runs on only GNU packages? I'm not particularly interested on ...

linux gnu hurd

Gilles

@terdon I've just cleaned up a few

terdon

Ah, OK

derobert

And then there are things like this, which are just tag-spamming:

5

Q: What's the "Unix way" for a CLI app to report no arguments specified?

I'm developing an application which I'd like to follow the "Unix way." What should I program it to do in case it is called with no arguments (which makes no practical sense): display an error message display help, or exit silently returning 0 considering the task specified (which is nothing...

command-line gnu posix standard unix-philosophy

Gilles

so the proportion of correct uses has increased somewhat in the last few minutes

terdon

OK

Gilles

22:04

@derobert hup

derobert

@Gilles hah, we both just submitted a nearly identical edit. You won the race, though.

terdon

The way it looks now, I'd say keep it. There seem to be quite a few questions that use the tag when differentiating between GNU and BSD or whatever versions of utils.

Gilles

yeah, ok, it just needs a lot of cleanup

I'd better stop or that'll fill the whole front page

derobert

the tag description needs a rewrite though

Gilles

@derobert indeed, it's a WP dump

copyvio, too

slm

22:06

@Gilles WP?

derobert

Wikipedia

Gilles

Wikipedia

Wikipedia ( or ) is a collaboratively edited, multilingual, free Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia's 30 million articles in 287 languages, including million}} in the English Wikipedia, are written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone having access to the site. ranking sixth globally among all websites on Alexa, and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. which is a portmanteau of wiki (a...

slm

thanks, WP often means wordpress

terdon

@Gilles, you just edited my rm question to remove gnu, why? That was one example of what I considered correct use of the tag. I was asking specifically about the GNU coreutils rm.

19

Q: Does 'rm .*' ever delete the parent directory?

The expression .* is expanded by bash to include the current and parent directories: $ ls -la total 2600 drwxrwxrwx 2 terdon terdon 2162688 Sep 10 16:22 . drwxr-xr-x 142 terdon terdon 491520 Sep 10 15:34 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 terdon terdon 0 Sep 10 16:22 foo $ echo .* . .. If I run rm -rf...

shell wildcards rm posix

slm

here's why that tag isn't refined enough

Gilles

22:08

> Is this a GNU thing or is it POSIX? Are there any *nix systems where the command above will silently delete . and ..?

no, the question isn't specifically about GNU

terdon

Ah, I see what you mean,

slm

there should be more descript versions of the GNU tag

terdon

I used it to show that I was interested in knowing if that was a GNU rm thing or POSIX or what.

So we should only use the tag to describe the project?

slm

the linux tag suffers this same issue

Gilles

@slm yes, I try to police its use but I've only retagged what, maybe 20% of the questions on the site, I need help

Michael Mrozek

22:10

We decided a long time ago to keep linux, and I'm not sure that was wise anymore; that tag is so thoroughly misused

Gilles

@MichaelMrozek we definitely need it

however, it would be nice if at least it was excised from incoming migrations

slm

@Gilles - I've seen you doing this but I'm uncomfortable retagging things such as this. I would be more than happy to help but we should do the activity with clearly laid out rules as to what's in and out, if we each go off and do it we'll only make it worse

terdon

I second that.

derobert

linux also has a useless wiki

slm

if you have a clear set of tests of what's in I would love to help you though!!!!

Gilles

22:12

@slm Ok, retagging rule: WWGT (what would Gilles tag?)

terdon

The gnu tag is a perfect example. I think that using it to differentiate between GNU and BSD versions of sed for example is a valid use. Do you guys disagree?

@Gilles you'll need to write an app for it :)

slm

yes these highlevel tags are abused and I started to look into fixing it but stopped when I realized it needs to be fixed by a group of us not just one or a few

Gilles

@terdon yes, that's a valid use

derobert

@terdon valid

terdon

OK, then it is not only for the GNU project as such.

However, this fails the WWGT test since G retagged my rm question to remove it.

Which was about whether a feature of rm is specific to the GNU one or is more generally true.

Conclusion: we need better tag wikis.

3

Gilles

22:15

@terdon exactly: it was about a comparison between all versions of rm, not specific to one or two variants

@terdon yes, definitely

I can't write them all

derobert

Gilles

and please remember that Wikipedia dumps are not better

derobert

Remember that's where tag wikis are seen most often

They need to answer the question, "should I use this tag?"

Gilles

@derobert specifically, that's excerpts

derobert

Yep, the excerpt should give a clue. Then "learn more" shows the full thing, which allows an in-depth explanation

slm

22:19

@Gilles - I would suggest it would probably be more fruitful for you to teach us how to tag correctly rather than try and do it yourself. I for one and game but in my previous attempts to retag I felt ill-equipped to do it correctly, and so now in general do not do it on existing Q&A on the site, only new stuff coming in.

terdon

I retag relatively often on all SE sites I'm active in.

Michael Mrozek

@derobert I think SO started the trend of useless tag wikis, and now everybody does it. The excerpt explaining what the tag name refers to is so completely unhelpful in most cases

terdon

The problem is that people often have slightly different views on the appropriateness of specific tags.

Gilles

@MichaelMrozek I think that happened naturally everywhere

derobert

@MichaelMrozek Yep. There is approximately no useful content in that screenshot.

Gilles

22:21

in fact, it happened first on newer sites, with relatively few tags and some highly motivated users who wanted to fill every tag wiki

slm

so then how do we want to approach this?

terdon

@Gilles ah, yes I've seen some of those on other sites. Good intentions but generating loads of work for higher rep users.

Gilles

hence things like the excerpt for books on Science Fiction & Fantasy:

> A book is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other various material, usually fastened together to hinge at one side.

created by a moderator

terdon

LOL, brilliant :)

Gilles

the wiki is a WP dump, of course

slm

22:22

I think the intent of the tags is misunderstood too, which is really the problem here

I mis-understood them in the beginning as well

derobert

@Gilles there are tags which just don't need wikis.

Unless SciFi is using it in some really weird way

@slm I wonder if everyone agrees on what they're for?

I believe they're for matching questions to experts; their main features are things like following/ignoring tags

terdon

I think we need a meta post for this. SU have their monthly tag cleanups, we could do something similar (though not monthly since we're not that big): identify problematic tags and ask the community to edit them. That way, more people get involved, the work gets spread around and we can work on a consensus on how it should be done.

slm

right so that's why I kind of stopped retagging older parts of the site

seemed like i would be doing more damage in some cases so i left it alone

Gilles

@derobert actually SFF does use the tag in a specific way, so there should be guidance. But indeed, not a definition.

Braiam

I try to answer "why should I use this tag for?" whenever I write an excerp.. unless the thing is too obscure

slm

22:25

i think most would see the tag as a way to guide others on what my Q is about.

terdon

@Gilles AFAIK on SFF it just means that I'm talking about the book, not the TV show or movie right?

Gilles

I've got several pending tag cleanup announcements

7

Q: Splitting the ports tag

ports isn't very big yet, but it's used for very different things. I propose to ban it (because it's too tempting for several different communities) and force the use of more specific tags: BSD ports (packages) → bsd-ports Communication ports such as serial ports → serial-port or the like TCP (...

discussion tags

yay, ports hasn't been back!

Braiam

arg!

Gilles

11

Q: router, routing, route

We have route and router and routing. I haven't inspected them closely, but I doubt there are three different meanings here. Is there any difference in meaning between these tags? (Note that I'm asking if the tags tend to be used with different meanings on this site, not if the words have diffe...

discussion tags

6

Q: Polysemy of the /scheduling tag

The scheduling tag has two unrelated meanings: the OS scheduler (task priorities, sched_getscheduler, etc.) scheduling a program to run at a certain time (cron, atc, etc.) These should be split. What should be the names of the two tags?

discussion tags

derobert

@slm Well, sort of—not what its about, but who its directed to. The question body ought to tell you what your question is about!

Gilles

22:27

the real big one:

4

Q: On the shell, shell-script, command-line and terminal tags

There are many questions using the tags command-line, shell, terminal. A cursory look suggests that most terminal questions are about terminal emulators and their configuration, while command-line questions are can be about shell programming, about finding the right utility to accomplish a task, ...

discussion tags

slm

@derobert - right, that's what the body is for, but ppl use the tags in this way all the time

sed/awk/etc. are abused to hell like this on Q's

if you have a Q and it's about how to script X and you don't care how it get's solved, don't tag it with sed/awk....

derobert

It actually makes some sense if you read it as "I think a sed expert would be the right person to answer this"

slm

tags are just not that well understood to most, and so they think of them as additional info to potential answers, when I use them all the time when looking for Q&A's to answer new Q's

terdon

That's the thing, you're both right.

Tags are also used to highlight the Q's that interest you.

slm

@terdon - yup

terdon

22:30

This is not such a big deal here but on SU where they have loads of questions a day, I just skim through the first page and only read the questions that are highlighted because they have my favorite tags.

slm

so I see Gilles chipping away at them but I've been frozen on touching old stuff

derobert

Honestly, the "tags describe the question's topic" view leads to the same result as the "tags describe the expert who can answer" view 99% of the time

terdon

I think this is a general problem on SE with people using tags in different ways.

slm

@terdon - I use the tags for that same thing on SU too & SO & SF, but not here

so what do we want to do here then?

i'm game but we need to be organized about it

otherwise we're mining for gold in 100 different places

terdon

And will be undoing each other's edits.

slm

22:32

and some are using picks while others are panning

derobert

I think the first thing we ought to do is take some of our top tags, agree on what we want them to cover, and fix the wikis

slm

what constitutes top?

Gilles

@terdon back when, I stopped using SU primarily because I spent too much time retagging badly tagged crap

@slm linux, bash, command-line

terdon

@Gilles also true.

derobert

@slm unix.stackexchange.com/tags

slm

22:33

popular = top?

derobert

good enough approximation to start with

Gilles

we need to decide what to do with command-line vs shell, shell-script vs shell+scripting, linux-kernel vs linux+kernel, ...

derobert

yeah, there are some messes there for sure!

files is the first one with a useful excerpt. Wow :-(

terdon

@Gilles yes, I quite agree with your meta post on that.

@all I just changed the Linux tag excerpt to:

 Questions that are specific to those Unix-like operating systems that are running the Linux kernel. Don't use this tag if your question is applicable to any Unix or Unix like OS.

Is that the kind of thing we're after?

@derobert kernel is OK too.

slm

Seems like they should all start with "Questions that are.." or "Use this tag for.."

derobert

22:36

@terdon With way too many words... Give me a sec with the improve button

Actually, the improve button is missing. So I'll have to do it here instead

terdon

@derobert missing where? In the review queue? Are you talking about the change I made to linux?

derobert

@terdon Yeah, I'm only given the option to approve/reject/skip

Can't improve it, possibly because I don't have enough rep

terdon

@slm yeah, I'm thinking that the excerpt should be "Use this for..." and the description can be "This is..."

derobert

@terdon "Questions specifically about Linux as opposed to Unix-like systems in general"

terdon

@derobert don't see how, you have 40 or so less than I, we should have the same privileges.

@derobert OK, I was trying to avoid getting flamed for not mentioning GNU.

derobert

22:39

@terdon Normally, "Improve" would have the side-effect of instantly approving the edit. I probably need 20K for that.

terdon

Hmm, OK, haven't seen that but I don't have 20k anywhere yet.

derobert

@terdon yeah, you don't have 20k (neither do I, here), so that's why yours went into the approval queue instead of instant applying

slm

Can we create a Q in meta to capture this work?

how can we keep tabs on it?

derobert

@slm sure... you don't need our permission to post to meta :-D

slm

CR isn't gonna work for tracking this

terdon

22:41

@derobert that I knew, I wanted it to go into the queue, that's why I'd rather us <20k users do this so that more eyes get to see and decide.

slm

what am i getting drafted for this now? 8-)

terdon

CR?

slm

chatroom

terdon

Ah

Seriously? You went to the trouble of SHIF+C, SHIFT+H to avoid typing chat? :)

That is one less net motion!

slm

unless gilles objects i'll start a meta Q with the tags gilles and derob. mentioned

terdon

22:43

That would be appreciated.

slm

i hold down the right shift for that

terdon

I know, that's why it's three movements and not four.

slm

so the plan is to list the tags we'll go after, rewrite their excerpts and wiki entries and then focus on retagging using them, right?

Gilles

@slm look for existing discussions first, I think I only mentioned ones that we'd discussed in the past

slm

@Gilles - will do

terdon

22:44

@Gilles there did not seem to have been too much discussion there and your Qs are quite old. We have a lot more users now (I think) and a more active community. It might be worth re-posting.

slm

if they were started, I'll link them into this new Q so there is linkages

Braiam

I think I will borrow some tags excerpts for AU :P, if things goes smoothly :D

Gilles

@terdon if the old questions are too stale, post a new one and we'll close the old one as a dupe

slm

AU stealing all our hard work

Braiam

@slm exactly :D

no, seriouly, tags there arent any better

slm

22:46

OK, i'll work the meta Q up tonight

tags in general are rough

across all SE

Braiam

yeah, as I said, whenever I write an excerpt unless the word is too obscure, I only describe its use

Gilles

Information Security has very good tags, and that didn't even involve a lot of discussion AFAIK

derobert

@Braiam Indeed. I think we can assume someone visiting our site knows what Linux and bash are.

slm

Ok I have to head home, still at work, family is gonna start to wonder

terdon

@derobert are you kidding? I though you read the questions!

A lot of people are confused about what linux and bash are.

slm

22:48

level of understanding of things is likely the reasoning behind poor execution of tagging

derobert

@terdon :-( not that many people... but a few...

More importantly, the folks doing retagging surely know.

Tags belong to the community, after all.

Braiam

I think world will end tomorrow if a mayor Distro change bash for zsh... for example

slm

@derobert - yeah right

terdon

Admittedly, the difference between Unix, Unix-like, GNU, GNU/Linux, Linux, shell, bash etc are not clear if you are not already a *nix geek.

Gilles

Ask Ubuntu is so confused they've made both terminal and shell aliases for command-line

terdon

22:49

Exactly.

Mind you, that might not be a bad idea for AU. Horrible for us of course, but most Ubuntu users will probably use the two interchangeably.

I probably would have when I started using Linux.

Braiam

@Gilles I always wondered about that...

Gilles

@Braiam I don't see any doing that. Ubuntu doesn't care about the command line, Debian and Arch don't take sides, FreeBSD loves its csh, OpenBSD loves its pdksh, ...

oh, OSX

derobert

@terdon Its probably fine there. If you want to know about shells, or terminals, etc., the Ubuntu command-line experts are the folks you want to ask.

slm

Yeah the tags are kind of driven by community to a degree, so if most people w/in a comm. don't understand that there is csh and tcsh they may tag them as the same thing which for them might be OK, even though it's wrong

Braiam

you might be a unix geek?

@slm the problem is... there is no wrong answer with what people want to do, people always will do thing against all reason all the time... BTW, see ya later. don't you gotta run?

slm

22:53

OK, see yeah in a bit

yup leaving

Gilles

Braiam

travel well

@Gilles I'm learning :D

terdon

@Braiam If "tar amosalata" makes any sense to you, you might be a Unix Greek.

Gilles

> If you have a server in your employ with more than 3 years of uptime…

terdon

Sorry, bad Greek pun, couldn't resist.

Gilles

22:54

I don't think I've had a UPS last that long

terdon

OK, I was going to ask if you've ever actually seen that.

Gilles

I think my record is a bit short of two years

and then the power failed

terdon

Not bad though!

derobert

@terdon I (or rather, a previous employer) had a server up that long. You wouldn't believe the OS it was running, though.

Gilles

@derobert windows?

terdon

22:56

@derobert well? C'mon the suspense is killing me. You're not going to say NT or something?

derobert

@Gilles Yep. Windows NT

It ran Oracle. It was best not touched out of fear.

And of course, it clearly had no security patches!

Gilles

in the CS lab where I used to work, we had an old Sun server (disused), an alpha server (replaced while I was there), and a replacement x86. I predicted that the x86 would fail first, then the alpha, then the sun.

derobert

My Unix boxes never stay up that long due to kernel upgrades. But most colos manage to keep the power on at least that long.

Gilles

But eventually the sun and the alpha were shut down to save power

derobert

There were a few questions with mint. I changed them to linux-mint

terdon

23:20

@derobert those should be made into synonyms.

We can add them to @slm's question when he gets a chance to write it.

derobert

@terdon There were something like three of them, hardly worth the synonym. Especially since when you type 'mint', 'linux-mint' shows up

terdon

fair enough

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