11

For example, and -- should they really be separate tags?

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  • Personally I would not be in favor of that. Most LaTeX users never check the documentation for the version of that package. We all encourage users, especially beginners, to work with a current updated version of the soffware. If we have separate tags someone new to TEX.SE probably would miss a subset of the postings. – R. Schumacher Apr 17 '15 at 20:59
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    @R.Schumacher They are two different packages, incompatible to one another. – egreg Apr 17 '15 at 21:56
  • @egreg I had checked TeXdoc.net and datetime2 had no documentation. I just went to CTAN and I see that it was put there 3/24/15. After reading both package documentation introductions, they are different packages, with datetime2 being the replacement version for datetime, which will not be maintained in the future. So, I would now, knowing this, concur with separate tags. It begs a curiosity question, what is the lag time for documentation to be found by TeXdoc.net – R. Schumacher Apr 17 '15 at 23:42
  • @R.Schumacher The maintainer must run tlmgr, I guess. – egreg Apr 17 '15 at 23:49
  • @R.Schumacher: I will poke Stefan, don't worry. :) – Paulo Cereda Apr 18 '15 at 12:00
7

Yes, they should: datetime has been declare obsolete and not any more maintained. It is still in the distributions for allowing compilation of older documents without needing to change them.

The new package datetime2 is different and incompatible with its predecessor, so questions dealing with it should not be confused with those referring to the obsolete version.

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  • The intent of the question was more of the general case, but I think that the 'incompatible changes' argument applies to most – if not all – sequels. Would you agree? – Sean Allred Apr 18 '15 at 0:21
4

In general, if the entity they represent is considered different, then separate tags would be okay. However, never use version-related tags, as versions become outdated and therefore typically useless.

For example, while we do have a tag, it was has been voted as a synonym for , and rightly so. There would be little value in having a tag for each version of TeX Live. In the same way, version-specific tags for packages (or software) would not be very helpful.

Reference: What are the guidelines for using version-specific tags?

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  • If separate tags are OK, but versions should not be used to differentiate them, what should be used to make them unique? – Paul Gessler Apr 18 '15 at 2:23
  • @PaulGessler: Well in this case, the two packages are named similarly but are different. I would think it best to stick to datetime and datetime2. You'd probably find similar likeness between algorithms, algorithm2e, algorithmicx... – Werner Apr 18 '15 at 5:46

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