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Should we use more specific version tags for software?
Some questions, like my own In Windows 10 21H1, how do I remove the weather report in the task bar?, are specific to a given version of a product. Other questions are more generic, or apply to products that don't have version numbers per se (web applications would likely be a major such category). In some cases, the OP might not know whether the question applies to a specific version or more generally; in the case of my question, I knew it did because the undesired change happened immediately when upgrading.
Do we want more specific version tags, such as windows-10-21h1
?
Codidact already supports tag hierarchies, so such a tag can be a subtag of windows-10
, which in turn could be a subtag of, say, microsoft-windows
, which would allow tagging a question with the appropriately-scoped tag while still making it easy to find more general questions as well.
2 answers
If you're on Windows 10, you really should be on the latest version of Windows 10.
Therefore, I believe it's not necessary to tag version numbers. Version tags will near immediately become irrelevant anyway when the next update rolls out, and we can't tag every version a question applies to, so it just doesn't help that much.
If a later version changes the answer to the question, then well, they can update the answer.
Of course, this doesn't apply to software for which the versions are actually different products, not just updates of the same. For instance, Windows 7 and Windows 10 should have separate tags. In that case, they should be tagged as such.
0 comment threads
This is one of the use cases that motivated tag hierarchies. If we make windows-10-21h1
a child of windows-10
, then anybody searching for windows-10
will also see the questions from child tags by default. (You can restrict it to show only the parent tag and not children if you want, though I'm not sure why you would.) Meanwhile, we can better characterize posts with more specific tags so you can more easily find them, and from a child tag page you can navigate to the parent tag.
This doesn't apply to operating systems (I don't think), but we do need to keep in mind that hierarchies don't support multiple inheritance. If we wanted to have ms-office
have child tags for ms-word
, outlook
, etc, then we couldn't also mix in version there without fragmenting the hierarchy. I mean, you could have ms-office-2020
and its children, and ms-office-2017
and its children, all be children of ms-office
, but you couldn't then find all the Outlook questions regardless of version. So let's not do that.
1 comment thread