What's the purpose of the "plugin" tag?

Question

The plugin tag is a little odd, and without usage or wiki content its purpose is unclear at least to me, and I suspect to other users as well.

Here is some analysis:

• It currently has 11 questions in total.
• Three of those are for IDA plugins (although we already have idapro-plugins for that, with over 100 questions).
• Five relate to ollydbg plugins. Usage and development, mostly.
• One each for:
  • installing x64dbg plugins
  • reversing Lua
  • working around mac code signing (to load a plugin).

Edit:

I already removed the plugin from the following completely unrelated questions:

• (MacOS) disable codesign check / run codesign on multiple files
• Reversing Luac (is there a way to get proper variable names)

Answer 1

Given the listing you gave it's clear that, while idapro-plugins is a subset of plugin (oddly the former being plural here, while the latter is singular), the number of questions with the former tag completely outnumber the latter.

I think, however, that plugin should be more aptly named tool-plugin [1] to denote that this is about a common extension mechanism in reverse engineering tools. However, this is probably a matter of taste and so I fully expect objections.

The real problem starts now. It would make sense to keep the plugin to subsum any other questions about (RCE) tool plugins without substantial number of questions. Whenever a the tag for a particular tool reaches a certain popularity threshold, questions could be moved into a ${tool}-plugin (e.g. for ollydbg -> ollydbg-plugin). But then you'd also have to define such a threshold.

We have to weigh two things here.

1. For starters only five tags can be applied to any given question. It's been very rare in all my years and across SE sites that I really struggled to make do with "just" five tags. Only on rare occasions would I have wished for one or two more. So, given the limitation, it would make sense to create tool-specific ${tool}-plugin tags.
2. Yet, on the other hand, the power of combination (or Unix philosophy) comes to mind. ida and plugin together also explain nicely what's going on. But you need one more tag than for the tool-specific tags.

[1] ... or rce-tool-plugin, where RCE isn't implied merely by the fact that this is RE.SE, since we also allow non-code RE questions.

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My stance on what should be done

• The three questions tagged plugin that belong into idapro-plugins should be moved to that latter tag.
• all other plugin questions should stay and be combined with the tag for the tool hosting that plugin.
• discuss about whether a tool-specific plugin tag should be created, once plugin questions for a tag reach a certain (unspecified at this point!) popularity -> then open topic here on RE.meta.SE
• discuss whether idapro-plugins should be singular, if yes move existing name and create a tag alias
• discuss whether idapro-plugins should be called ida-plugins. The fact that editions lower than "Pro" don't allow for plugins (not officially anyway) implies that the "Pro" edition is meant. So no need to repeat that fact in the tag name. Tags should be concise. The tag wiki on the other hand could mention the above facts in the outline or its body.