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A proposed tag wiki edit raised a question about two tags: and . The first has 5 questions, the second has 8, and a number of these questions have both.

I'm not familiar with the program, but attempting to research it, I couldn't find a single word explaining the difference, and the terms are used interchangeably. Web sites (including the official project sites), have a title containing one term and content containing the other, with no explanation. My guess from the context is that aria2 is the project and aria2c is the executable.

The proposed wiki edits that raised the question were an attempt to copy the wiki and excerpt content to the tag. This appears to be a case where the separate tags are not serving a useful purpose.

  • Whatever the difference is between the two should be made clear in the tag wikis, and the excerpts should provide guidance on when to use each.
  • If the difference is unimportant, the tags should be synonomized, or one of them eliminated and the two terms be covered in the remaining wiki and excerpt.

If I was familiar with the program, I would just fix it (and I'll be happy to do that if somebody can explain the difference). So I'm raising the question so people familiar with it can either clarify or do the honors.

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  • 2
    aria2c has a man page while aria2 does not. I suspect you are right in that the "aria2c" is the "command" while "aria2" denotes the "project". I think that we could quite happily synonymise and merge one into the other if we can decide which way to go.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Nov 25, 2016 at 20:16
  • Actually, I wanted to make aria2c a synonym of aria2. The site said I couldn't do it because reputation of 5 in the tag is required. It didn't come to my mind that I can post a meta question to request making them synonyms. I tried to answer some of the tagged questions to get required points and edited tag wiki.
    – Alexey Ivanov
    Commented Nov 26, 2016 at 10:11

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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has been merged into and a synonym created.

updating post history, 8 rows affected (pipe delimited)
updating posts, 8 rows affected  (pipe delimited)
updating PostTags associations, 5 rows affected
updating Documentation tag proposal commitments, 0 rows affected
removing/renaming old tag, 0 rows affected
updating count for master tag, 1 rows affected
tag remapping of [aria2] and [aria2c] complete!
remapping 0 synonyms
1 favorite and ignored tags remapped!
0 tracked tag badges were remapped!
Tag Synonym aria2c -> aria2 was approved!
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My understanding is the same as yours: both aria2 and aria2c are used interchangeably. They should be synonymized.

The command you use to run the utility is aria2c. From that point of view, using it as the main tag looks more reasonable. At the same time, Google search gives much more results for aria2. Stack Overflow has only one tag: aria2.

To be consistent, aria2 is the one to use as the main tag.

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    For word association, it seems like aria2 would be the more general term, encompassing any question related to the product, while aria2c might be thought of as relating to command syntax. For example, many programs can use run-time parameters with the executable name or have a command that's different from the product name, but we generally use the product name for the tag rather than the executable name or command. That would be another rationale for using aria2 for the tag.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Nov 27, 2016 at 18:02
  • @fixer1234 I agree aria2 would cover both aspects: the project itself and usage of aria2c executable to perform a certain task.
    – Alexey Ivanov
    Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 7:11
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aria2 is package name and aria2c is a binary file inside it. As you can see here, aria2c is the only executable file inside aria2 package. Also its official website says:

aria2 is a lightweight multi-protocol & multi-source command-line download utility. It supports HTTP/HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, BitTorrent and Metalink. aria2 can be manipulated via built-in JSON-RPC and XML-RPC interfaces.

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  • Do you have any thoughts on which term would be better to use as the tag?
    – fixer1234
    Commented Nov 27, 2016 at 21:58
  • 4
    @fixer1234: I think aria2 is a better choice. aria2c isn't as famous as tools like apt-get to have a tag for aria2c. There is similar situation about sysstat package which contains these binaries: sar, sadf, sadc, etc. In this case I prefer we have one tag named sysstat instead of multiple tags sar , sadf , sadc , etc
    – SuB
    Commented Nov 28, 2016 at 8:57

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