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The GNOME project adopted a new versioning scheme last year because with GTK 4 they found it inappropriate to continue having the major number tied to GTK version. The next version following GNOME 3.38 became GNOME 40.0 instead of GNOME 3.40. They released GNOME 41.alpha in July this year.

After this change, the tag appears literally applicable only to GNOME 3.x. This year, 46 questions were asked with tag. Is having a separate tag for GNOME 3.x still appropriate? Shouldn't the change in versioning be reflected and tag dropped altogether by making it a tag synonym of ?

There are 41 watchers of tag in comparison to 114 watchers of tag. Considering that the tags practically stand for the same for new questions, this unreasonably punishes the poster of the question for choosing a more precise tag.

Assuming that stands for "GNOME after GNOME 2", merging into allows to prevent confusion under the new versioning scheme. The tag still allows to mark questions relevant to GNOME 2, so this should not be an issue. Anyway, there were no questions related to GNOME 2 this year.

Update: I was trying to avoid hoarding multiple questions in one, but the issue of tag is related.

The change from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 was a "rewrite the world event", which GNOME intends to avoid in the future. Tweaking and troubleshooting GNOME 2 and GNOME 3 was different experience. The change caused MATE and Cinnamon into existence. In GNOME 3, there is GNOME Flashback (former GNOME Fallback) session, which is still different as it tries to follow the current GNOME development.

There are many old questions about GNOME 2, starting as early as 2010. However, original authors of questions used the tag for the first time in 2014 and for the last time in 2017. It was used by the original authors only 6 times. In the rest 14 cases, the questions were re-tagged by someone else, in most cases long after the question was asked. Should we go on with such re-tagging? The latest question was asked 5 years ago and there are no watchers of the tag.

It would be fair to differentiate between GNOME 2 and GNOME 3, but such differentiation hardly exists in questions by now, other then by

  • the version specified in the question and
  • by the time of the question.
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  • As someone who's largely unfamiliar with the GNOME ecosystem, is there anything (or "enough") about gnome2 or gnome3 that would require specialized knowledge? I'm thinking along the lines of "grub" vs "grub2" where it really matters which version you're running. Beyond that, I think synonyms makes sense if/when the version number is prominent in discussing the technology beyond being simply a version. Merging would mean that a question could not be tagged with "gnome2" or "gnome3". (To be clear, I have no preference at this time)
    – Jeff Schaller Mod
    Commented Aug 2, 2021 at 13:11
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    @JeffSchaller yes: gnome <3 was a very different beast. I suspect (but do not know) that we only really need one tag for gnome < 3 and one for gnome >= 3. Although, as Roman's data also suggests, I suspect gnome2 will be very, very rare these days.
    – terdon Mod
    Commented Aug 2, 2021 at 14:35

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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It might be worth considering the merit of a gnome-legacy tag to catch GNOME 1.x / 2.x cases, and a gnome tag for all versions in the new paradigm.

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  • It would be great if the tag was something that the original poster of the question first thinks to use intuitively, but "gnome-legacy" is not a well known name for GNOME 1 and 2. I imagine the poster typing "gnome" and never getting to "gnome-legacy" because of becoming overwhelmed by all the "gnome-…" options.
    – Roman Riabenko
    Commented Aug 19, 2021 at 9:55
  • True, but if the other tags are purged (and historical questions retagged), the only ones that should appear as suggestions would be the two of gnome and gnome-legacy.. and I'm honestly hard-pressed to think at the moment of another option that's sufficiently breviloquent for a set of two tags. gnome-3-or-greater and gnome-2-or-lesser is just awkward.
    – DopeGhoti
    Commented Aug 19, 2021 at 14:00
  • There are no posts mentioning "gnome 1". And the oldest questions mentioning "gnome" (from 2010) are already about GNOME 2 (which was already there for a long time since its release in 2002). Considering that, it is still early to extend the "gnome 2" tag to include GNOME 1 because it is not evident that we will ever need to.
    – Roman Riabenko
    Commented Aug 26, 2021 at 9:40

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