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Re @Prabhjot Singh Problem with alsa-plugins-freeworld-lavcrate when upgrading to Fedora 28

"Questions describing a problem that can't be reproduced and seemingly went away on its own (or went away when a typo was fixed) are off-topic as they are unlikely to help future readers."

The claim here is that removing a third party package counts as "when a typo was fixed". Why is this?

The question can be, and was, answered with a simple reference to the upgrade documentation. It's already pretty helpful. Such a Q&A would be a valid target for potentially quickly signposting future askers. I was kind of surprised that I didn't notice such a target in the auto-search sidebar.

Notice that the doc doesn't treat this as a simple mistake. It's a tradeoff - upgrade to the latest Fedora at this time; lose your third-party packages that haven't updated at the moment.

This is not just a question of reading comprehension either. The reason that third-party repos would show this error is not automatically obvious.

E.g. it's relevant to see that the official Fedora advice is not that you need always to disable all third-party repos first... and then have it be pot-luck to find out whether you can re-install after the upgrade.

The documentation also claims that you will want to take care to pass a specific option, so that you're not downloading the entire upgrade and throwing it away if you cancel and look again at this command several times. I have not been affected by this, but if I was, I would not consider it trivial.

(To anyone who claims they would always be aware of all documentation every time they do an upgrade, I would respectfully quote this from LWN.net regarding Debian: "They are usually pretty simple... but the actual upgrade process is really much more complex. If you run into problems with the above commands, you will quickly learn that you should have followed the release notes, a whopping 20,000-word, ten-section document that outlines all the gory details of the release."

Fedora is better, sure. But the last time I checked, even they didn't manage to link from the GUI upgrade tool through to the "Common F2X bugs" page for the release).

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    Agree, voted to reopen. I don't see how this “went away on its own”.
    – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
    May 8, 2018 at 12:04
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    Thanks, it's been re-opened now. AFAIR this was closed after the answer was posted... I guess otherwise the answer couldn't have been posted :-). So at the time I didn't want to just vote to re-open: it would have been edit-warring. Thoughts about why this can happen in the first place - and whether I needed to spend so many words to achieve this remedy - would be welcome, in the spirit of stackoverflow.blog / stack-overflow-isnt-very-welcoming-its-time-for-that-to-change
    – sourcejedi
    May 8, 2018 at 13:41
  • ISTM that this close reason is greatly over-used; that it is used whenever the OP solves the problem, no matter how complicated and non-obvious the solution is.
    – G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica'
    May 11, 2018 at 6:14
  • Is a vote to re-open edit warring? Is there a meta question about that?
    – dcorking
    May 11, 2018 at 9:49
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    @dcorking I was talking about what I personally felt comfortable doing. I haven't seen a meta on it, and I don't remember being told so by anyone. Specifically, this is about voting to re-open when the close decision has been made in error. It's not re-opening because the question has been edited with an improvement. It would feel like warring to me because there's no reason the closers shouldn't vote the same way again.
    – sourcejedi
    May 11, 2018 at 10:27
  • I didn't see how adding a comment could help, because this was obvious from the posted answer already. Hence my followup comment, to ask if I needed quite so much effort to resolve this.
    – sourcejedi
    May 11, 2018 at 10:27
  • I think the answer to my followup is that the answer post-dated some of the close votes, so it might have been worth pointing to it in a comment & pressing the button to vote for re-open.
    – sourcejedi
    May 11, 2018 at 10:30
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    @G-man - it probably is, but I think in many of those cases it should be closed in some fashion. In particular, without a meaningful answer from the OP, this close reason can be the closest meaningful option when no one except the OP could likely provide a meaningful answer.
    – cunninghamp3
    May 15, 2018 at 17:51

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