Should LibreSSL have a tag?

Question

There is no tag for LibreSSL, and I've now encountered several Qs that are tagged openssl but are actually about Libre. Searching "libressl" finds 55 Qs while "libressl [openssl]" gets 34 of them -- over half. As these packages are intentionally very similar, and in particular Libre's commandline program is still named openssl for compatibility with scripts and documentation, in some cases the Q (and A) does apply to both, but not always. Is it worth having a separate tag, or should we just have openssl's description say something like "includes the forked and mostly-workalike LibreSSL"?

FWIW SO does have a separate tag and has 51 Qs for libressl vs 14,230 for openssl. I didn't try to assess Qs which are actually about either one (or both!) but not tagged.

Answer 1

I would say yes.

While they aim to be compatible with OpenSSL, they've added some features not available in OpenSSL, and removed deprecated ciphers. It's simply not OpenSSL anymore, and in a lot of scenarios I can think of situations where the difference is relevant.

IMHO the only reason for us not to have that tag is that users won't be able to differentiate... I have no idea what library I have installed on my desktop for instance, but would probably check before asking a question related to it.

Answer 2

I have no domain knowledge here, but my leanings are towards using one tag.

If the majority of Libre SSL questions are also Open SSL questions, they should have the same tag so they can be easily searched. If there were two tags, a lot of common issues might be tagged with Libre SSL, thereby hiding them. It is hard to get people to use tags in a consistent manner when the delimination is a bit tricky.

But are we to take this route, it should be made "official" in the tag wiki, as you say, and perhaps with an alias tag as well.

But perhaps someone who actually knows something about this software should way in instead of me! :-)