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The tag contains about 200 questions that are about completely unrelated concepts:

  • Some questions are about source code repositories like Git.

  • Most questions are about the DDD Repository Pattern.

  • A few questions about artefact repositories (like Maven or Nuget).

I noticed this because of a suggested edit providing (rather vague) tag guidance that this tag is mainly about “a place to store digital products along with the necessary software to manage the storage”.

What is the community consensus on this tag?

  • Should it be left in its ambiguous, pluralistic state?

  • Should we retag the questions to more specific tags? If so, what would be better tags for the above use cases?

1 Answer 1

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Good question. Without making an exhaustive survey, my impression is the majority of questions of the last year using the term repository are about what you call "DDD Repository Pattern", so I think that usage would probably fit to the most number of posts (the repository pattern seems to have become quite popular even without DDD). To the other cases:

Some questions are about source code repositories like Git.

I think for these the tags "version-control" or "git" or "svn" will be better suited, since the term "repository" is often just used a technical detail of the referred version control system.

A few questions about artefact repositories (like Maven or Nuget).

These are indeed often called "repositories". However, we have already a tag "package-managers" and tags "nuget" and "maven".

So if we decide to make a tag description, my vote would go to tailor it specificially for the first usage.

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    I like this, but do you think that repository is sufficient? Or should things about the repository pattern be renamed to repository-pattern? If it helps, if there's sufficient cleanup, I can force the tag rename to happen. We already have -pattern tags for things like builder pattern, visitor pattern, observer pattern, etc.
    – Thomas Owens Mod
    Oct 9, 2017 at 13:23
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    @ThomasOwens: I see pros and cons. "repository-pattern" would surely avoid some misintepretations of people who are too lazy to read the tag description. However, it is also a little bit lengthy for a tag name, and I am not sure everyone sees the usage of a repository class really as a design pattern in the strict sense. But whatever you or other people decide here, I am happy with the either or the other decision, since I typically read the description of a tag before I use them.
    – Doc Brown
    Oct 9, 2017 at 15:04
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    repository-pattern would be my vote. Tags are already limited for length anyway. Oct 10, 2017 at 15:05
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    "[P]eople who are too lazy to read the tag description" constitute 95% of the users on many sites. I think it is more important for tag names to be unambiguous than short.
    – Anders
    Oct 17, 2017 at 7:26
  • I started retagging a few questions, and have create a repository-pattern tag. There's now a new question that has used this tag organically. So extrapolating from that one data point, this unambiguous name seems to work.
    – amon
    Oct 17, 2017 at 11:26

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