Let's take a look at the numbers of postings with various Mac-related tags:
mac 559
macos 44
mactex 482
texshop 495 % a Mac-only front end
latexian 13 % another Mac-only front end
macros 5752 % "macros" is among the "top ten" of all tags on TeX.SE
The majority of the 44 macos
-tagged postings is not actually related to MacOS (the operating system) in a meaningful way. If anything, many of these postings should be re-tagged as either mac
or mactex
. However, there is a handful of macos
-tagged postings with a clear link to MacOS, so I wouldn't get rid of the macos
tag entirely -- or make it into a synonym for mac
.
I can see no justification for re-tagging all 559 mac
-tagged postings as macos
. The focus of the overwhelming majority of the mac
-tagged postings is clearly the Mac ecosystem, not the MacOS operating system (a small subset of the Mac ecosystem). One can easily verify that some of the mac
-tagged postings are not acually all clearly related to any part of the Mac ecosystem and hence that the mac
tag isn't appropriate for them. However, the fact that the postings are tagged incorrectly cannot be a reason for adopting the macos
tag for them.
I would certainly not advocate changing the tag of mactex
postings to macos
.
There are also some postings tagged with texworks
, a multi-platform front-end, and some of these postings are from users who use texworks
on a Mac. However, the focus of these postings is on texworks
, and it would be an error to change their tags to mac
, let alone macos
.
Another thought: Currently, postings tagged with macros
outnumber those tagged with macos
by a factor of more than one hundred to one. Since we should care about not creating unnecessary confusion, and because macos
and macros
do look rather alike at first glance, increasing the number of macos
-tagged postings by a factor of more than 10 could very well be rather counterproductive.
osx
synonym is already available in the main-site – Raaja Jun 10 at 5:58macros
andmacos
is pretty small and the tags are displayed pretty small. I don't like the proposal therefore. – Skillmon Jun 10 at 9:16macros
tag. Same with Code Review. If they are able to make bothmacros
andmacos
tags work, I don't see why this site should be any different. – Thunderforge Jun 10 at 15:32macos
is already used so the "confusion" is already here. – Paul Gaborit Jun 11 at 23:44macos
as a synonym that redirects tomac-os
, then we'd still have confusion anyway. – Thunderforge Jun 12 at 14:52macos
-tagged postings on TeX.SE, 482mactex
-tagged postings, and a whopping 5752macros
-tagged queries. Changing the tag of themac
postings tomacos
would increase the number ofmacos
-tagged queries by a factor of more than 10 -- and thus quite likely cause actual confusion. – Mico Jun 13 at 6:07