Raiders of the Lost Downboat

@Zanna I purposely put that comment after an answer that I knew would be deleted because an IT professional with 57 years of experience deserves that much attention to protect her from despair caused by lack of attention from users who don't care. She read the comment before the answer was deleted, so I don't see the point of posting further because even if it worked it would still be a duplicate answer.

Zanna

6:53 AM

OK, thanks for taking the time to explain :)

Zanna

8:33 AM

I just edited (as part of my "sudo gedit" is:a cleanup) this answer but I suspect it could be completely wrong o.O

Eliah Kagan

11:07 AM

You mean the answer itself could be completely, wrong, as Gilles has commented:

Uh? Never-MarkAuto-Sections doesn't do this at all: it causes packages in a section not to be marked as automatically installed. You can't use package names, only section names. You can't use wildcards, only exact names. And this doesn't do anything about whether the package will be installed. — Gilles Oct 4 '12 at 0:49

...and not that your edit could be completely wrong, right?

Zanna

11:21 AM

Yeah. In which case my edit is also wrong as it doesn't fix the problem. But if only my edit is completely wrong that's easily fixed

Eliah Kagan

11:38 AM

Well originally it was just sudo gedit, right? That can make gedit fail to work right when the user runs it without elevated privileges. So even if the answer is wrong, you've made it a bit less wrong in one way while not making it any more wrong in the ways it's wrong. If it's wrong.

Zanna

True... I also added a .. I am inclined to believe Gilles. But... 5 upvotes...

Eliah Kagan

Does this question have enough information to be answered? Should we put it on hold as unclear? I've commented to request more information, and while editing the text of my comment down to the character limit it occurred to me to post an answer. Normally I heartily approve of answers that contain some speculation--they are better than half-answers posted in comments.

However, in this case it seems to me that it would be almost entirely speculation, plus I don't really have any specific advice to give short of writing a treatise on how permissions work. I also think Wordpress should already be set up in a way that lets files be uploaded, though I have little experience with Wordpress and none at all in years.

Zanna

11:54 AM

Hmm maybe someone with the same setup would find enough information there. Hard to say for me. I agree with you that speculation in answers is fine (and potentially good since it could make the answer applicable to multiple scenarios that lead to the same problem). I don't understand who needs what kind of access to what in that situation, but I don't know if that information could be deduced from the title by others

oh I'm doing that irritating thing of replying to every message whether or not I have anything useful to say

Eliah Kagan

It's fine with me. :)

@Zanna Indeed, I am not ashamed of my original delete vote either. (We had both cast delete votes on the post.)

Zanna

:) :)

Eliah Kagan

I've VTC'd that question as unclear. I don't really think it can be answered now, the second half of the question is unclear (I'd ask about it but don't want to deluge the OP with multiple comments, and maybe it will become clear if they provide what I've requested), and aside from enormous answers comprehensively explaining ownership and permissions, most answers it could get would be ill-advised recommendations to set unnecessarily permissive permissions.

Zanna

I agree with that

ugh I don't know what to do with that

I voted to leave closed since they don't think they give any useful info about what they have tried or even what it is

Eliah Kagan

12:23 PM

I have voted to leave it closed.

Unrelated to that, I don't see any good reason for this answer to have been deleted. I don't think we should undelete it, because the git page it points to is 404 now. And I understand the downvotes, because someone's programming exercise that hardly anyone has used and that you have to compile yourself is not as reasonable a choice as any of a numerous immediately available command-line calculator and expression-evaluation options.

(I call it a "programming exercise" because the git repo was called Shunting-Yard-Parser, which names the algorithm being used rather than the problem being solved, suggesting its purpose was to practice implementing that algorithm.)

Zanna

hmm yeah, now I don't think there was any particular need to delete that, it wasn't doing any harm there

Eliah Kagan

Still, I can't help but think its deletion--not necessarily your vote, there were three deleters--was related to misconceptions about Mono, such as the idea that any version of Mono has ever not been fully free (as in freedom) software. Banshee requires Mono, which is related to why it doesn't ship by default in Ubuntu--it requires a lot of dependencies that weren't required by other stuff on the live CD. But it's not unreasonable to recommend users install Banshee.

Zanna

I didn't know that... there are plenty of folks here using banshee I think

or have been over the years

Eliah Kagan

Yeah, packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/banshee. I don't know how popular it is these days. I used it for a long time before switching to Audacious (not to be confused with Audacity, which is an audio editor.)

Zanna

12:39 PM

I only just got sound kinda working at all on my original Ubuntu machine haha

Eliah Kagan

Original, like the first machine you ever installed Ubuntu on...?

Zanna

yes. Asus X205TA. The patch I'm using to provide support for the soundcard is getting merged in 4.13 I think

Eliah Kagan

Hi @jokerdino!

jokerdino

hey

Zanna

hugs

what are you doing here?

jokerdino

12:54 PM

Just turned on my laptop for some stuff

Zanna

oh so it wasn't really intentional? Haha and now we can ping you with inane things for days

Eliah Kagan

Should this answer be considered separate from the OP's other one? Or should it be added to their earlier answer and deleted?

Zanna

1:09 PM

Hmm I don't mind that answer being separate I guess. To me it looks like a different way of solving the problem

but maybe it's incomplete

Eliah Kagan

Makes sense.

edwinksl

whoa dino is here

Zanna

ikr

but I think only because he foolishly pinned the tab and accidentally fell in here due to opening ff while trying to do something serious

Eliah Kagan

That's why I use three different browsers, sometimes at the same time. It's easier to avoid opening up tabs that will distract me, or seeing them when doing something else. :)

Zanna

I'm currently trying to read a software manual, and making no progress at all. I should just close the browser entirely (the manual is a pdf)

Eliah Kagan

1:23 PM

I am tempted to ask what software manual but discussing that would probably distract you even further so please feel extremely free to not answer the implied question that I should probably not even be asking in an implied way. :)

Zanna

haha it's the manual for QCAD (CAD drawing program). I'm hopeless at reading manuals of any kind, so I was trying to figure it out by fiddling with it (based on my experience of using AutoCAD quite a lot a few years ago) but I keep getting stuck, and it turns out the manual is rather well written and easy to follow, so I'm giving it a go

jokerdino

1:40 PM

@Zanna its not a foolish thing

Zanna

oops

Zanna

1:54 PM

@jokerdino I only meant it might result in silly zannas bothering you

jokerdino

:)

Zanna

(:

Zanna

2:08 PM

question deleted before I could answer it sigh

oops

reads manual

Zanna

3:00 PM

I think this question is unclear but I don't want to vote because I'll be signing the off-topic

which I don't agree with

this happens to me all the time lately!

Eliah Kagan

3:23 PM

If it's happening all the time then there is a problem, because people should not be saying things aren't about Ubuntu that are about Ubuntu! In this question, only three votes said off-topic, so I just cast an unclear vote. When the minority is 2, the majority members are shown in the close message. (I think this sometimes happens with a minority of 1 but I am not sure.)

I don't know a general solution to this problem, though, in terms of how to operate the closure system.

However, ultimately the bigger problem is not with the close dialog but instead with people's inappropriate close votes (or inappropriate close reason selection). I think the best things to do, depending on the situation, are to explain why the reason is wrong, ask people why they voted they way they did, sometimes ping people in chat to ask them why they voted the way they did, and when you notice a bad trend--as you seem to have--post on meta about it.

Zanna

I thought that everyone appears in the list regardless... maybe I misunderstood you

Of course being in the list doesn't really matter

but the message OP gets will be the wrong one... instead of "improve your question so we can answer it" they get "your question doesn't belong here"

Eliah Kagan

It appears in the list of people who closed the question as "off-topic" but not in the list people who selected the reason why it was off-topic. This is still confusing and probably appears unanimous to newcomers, but it provides verifiable evidence to support a comment explaining the situation.

Zanna

I often write comments for this purpose, but when the majority has already voted a way I don't agree with it's difficult to imagine what good it will do

Thank you for the advice :)

I see what you mean about the listing now

Eliah Kagan

It's really confusing, though. It's possible that I am understating the degree to which the SE system's design here is responsible, because when people see a closure that looks unanimous, they may think, "Huh, that's considered off-topic. Okay! I'll keep that in mind for my own reviews!"

Zanna

yeah :(

thank you for your comment there

sometimes I can't formulate a good comment because I don't know how OP can get the required info etc

Eliah Kagan

3:36 PM

Stack Exchange is confusing.

edwinksl

rekt

i probably misread

jokerdino

tea-rekt

Eliah Kagan

Lol.

edwinksl

dino still lurking :O

Eliah Kagan

Sorry, I don't mean to single out people for this. Most people have selected the wrong option the the close dialog a few times, and that definitely includes me. I made the screenshot to illustrate how confusing the message can be that Stack Exchange shows users when a question is closed and not all voters agree about why.

One of the goals of the message is to help people fix their questions even if nobody comments with a detailed explanation, but in practice comments are often necessary because the information Stack Exchange shows is so confusing.

I do not mean "Stack Exchange is confusing" sarcastically. Stack Exchange is confusing!

Zanna

3:42 PM

@EliahKagan haha meta post

ugh I have clicked terrible things at times, and sometimes it's not fixable >_<

Eliah Kagan

If I understand what you had said correctly, you've been seeing a lot of questions with 3 or more off-topic close votes that are totally on-topic but may have other problems. I'm not really equipped to post on meta about this problem, but you may want to.

Zanna

What I've observed is that I keep not wanting to vote although I want to close the question, because I disagree with close reason already chosen by the majority. I need to observe for longer, because I am not sure it's a trend for off-topic voting; it's sometimes as a duplicate for sure

now I know people VTC as duplicate questions that seem to be not exactly duplicates and could be closed for another reason because the target has information that will help indirectly, and sometimes I find that OK

but sometimes I don't agree with it (there were a couple of instances where instead of Unclear, questions that said "my wifi doesn't work on 16.04" were closed as duplicates of My Wireless doesn't work, what info is needed to diagnose the issue which is not the intended use of that question imho)

and sometimes I think the target is just a bad choice for some reason

Eliah Kagan

3:59 PM

This unclear question also got an off-topic > not about Ubuntu vote (though just one... so far).

Zanna

A meta question on this could be too expansive maybe. It might end up being a big list of what is on topic, which would probably be a bad post because there would be too many possible areas of contention

mistaken off-topic votes:
- custom kernel
- software recommendation
- more than one distro installed or in use
- question is not *specific* to Ubuntu eg "how do I make a directory within a directory both at the same time"
- question relates to programming (but is actually an end-user issue to do with Ubuntu, or a question about developing software for Ubuntu)

I might write a meta question about posts like "will Ubuntu work well on Dell Latitude E5054" because they get summarily closed and I think they can be OK. But I might just be wrong (or fail to convince others) on that

But I wouldn't want to try to address all those in one post...

Eliah Kagan

4:26 PM

So, are software recommendations on-topic or off-topic these days? I'm actually unsure. (I've been clicking Skip on posts people say are off-topic for this reason and meaning to check.)

My personal view is that it doesn't make much sense for them to be off-topic because it's often not even possible to know if a question is a software-recommendation question. "How do I do X?" I would say that software recommendation questions are sometimes too broad but shouldn't be considered off-topic. That's just my personal opinion, though. I presume we have some established community consensus on this.

Zanna

I think they are on topic and I don't think they should be off-topic

Hmm I joined the site last April... I remember reading

1

Q: Why are software recommendations on topic?

Background: this question originates from a flag I raised and that was recently denied. The question asked about an alternative to a Windows software. This topic has been discussed previously but the answers there do not seem any reasonable to me. Maybe they were in the past, before the Soft...

discussion

I don't recall seeing any recent meta discussions that came to the conclusion that software recommendations should be off-topic...

Eliah Kagan

Thanks.

Zanna

maybe people are confused because I think hardware recommendations are considered off topic... this might even be my fault

11

Q: Can we burninate [hardware-recommendation]?

The help center says: Questions that you should avoid: Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Backtrack, Gnome-Remix (prior to 13.04), budgie-remix (16.04 and 16.10) and other Linux distributions (try our friends at Unix & Linux Stack Exchange). Bug reports (How do I submit a bug?). Issues wi...

discussion feature-request status-completed tags scope

Eliah Kagan

I think part of the problem with review quality is that the only quality control mechanisms that are part of the system itself are review audits (which warn users on failure and can result in bans on repeated failures) and manual review bans imposed by moderators (which are, for good reason, rarely used).

While post quality control is about the posts first and about their authors second if at all, the quality control on reviews and close/reopen/delete/undelete votes is entirely about the users doing, and only about the actions themselves in made-up case that are usually transparent and are not even intended to teach anything except "actually look before you click."

Zanna

4:41 PM

On several occasions when I've failed an audit, including the last one, after doing so I went to the real post and did that action I tried to do in the review (or voted to reopen the question that was already closed)

yeah it's basically just trust folks to do a good job. Which we mostly do more or less, hopefully

Eliah Kagan

Yeah, there's not much the audits can really do. It may be possible to improve audits--in particular, some audits seem to be easier to pass when one is robot-reviewing than when one is paying attention and at minimum that should be improved on--but even if the audits are made better I don't think they can solve the problem of people not checking what our existing policies actually say.

I think, vaguely speaking, review choices that involve knowing and correctly applying a policy (like, are questions about X on-topic according to the rules of the site?) can be made in two ways. Really there is something of a continuum between the two and this is about actions (which is my main point, the system does not adequately improve the actions that make up review). This is not a divide between the "good reviewers" and the "bad reviewers."

(A) by carefully checking that the policy is correct and, when there is any dispute or even a sign dispute or confusion might arise, providing a citation and (B) carelessly translating personal feelings of whether or not a post is Ubuntuy enough into a review and--sometimes--an actual comment making unsupported claims about site policy.

And the problem is that (B) will always win out over (A) overall, because it is faster and easier and requires less energy and time and commitment to make review and commenting choices that fall under (B) than those that fall under (A).

Zanna

Hmm karel set a nice example of A on that post that had custom close votes (the custom kernel one)

Eliah Kagan

Yes. Adding a link to the relevant meta post is always good when confusing is occurring.

(from above) *robo-reviewing

Zanna

I knew what you meant :)

and I am familiar with *here's the correction to that thing I posted up there

Eliah Kagan

Yeah, I just wanted to make sure it was clear I was not adding some sort of weird subtext to the thing about the custom kernel question. :)

Zanna

4:52 PM

hahaha

Eliah Kagan

I think (B) is a sub-case of the general problem of not checking one's assumptions before representing them as fact, but in answers we have the voting system, editing, and a number of users knowledgeable about the technical topics related to most questions and answers on the site. For reviews, and claims by high or moderately high rep users about what site policy says, we don't really have anything that consistently pulls things back toward accuracy.

Zanna

hmm yes indeed

Eliah Kagan

I am reminded of one post I wrote a while ago in which I stated how ' works in Bourne-style shells, and my claim was clearly wrong--obvious to someone who already knows how it worked, or to someone who checked how it worked (which apparently didn't include me!), but potentially harmful or at least confusing to people who did not.

Fortunately our community is such that experienced people read posts and can correct things or comment, and someone soon fixed it. I still don't know how I made that mistake but fortunately little harm was probably done. I think Gilles was the one who fixed it. I'll see if I can find the post.

Anyway, the point is, if I had made a similarly obvious mistake by misstating site policy, likely no one would have noticed, and if people had noticed, likely they would have growled under their breath and not done anything about it if they didn't have an hour to spend going back and forth about it, expending massively more time and effort to fix my mistake than I would have spent making it.

To use a deliberately silly example (so as to avoid the appearance that I'm thinking of any particular post, since I am not, though I have seen things as silly as this): If someone said, "GNOME is off-topic on Ask Ubuntu," that takes them a couple seconds. Someone who then corrects it can say, "Why?" which takes a second but they'll get into an unproductive back-and-forth that will take longer.

Or they can bring up the help page on what's on-topic and copy and paste from it, quote from it, search meta, add links to meta posts, read what they wrote to make sure it makes sense, cut it down to fit in a single comment (or split it into multiple comments), and so forth.

It takes way longer and because "GNOME is off-topic" is short and simple and easy to understand, casual readers may still assume that's the rule and that the person citing actual policies is just ranting about their opinion.

Not to be confused with what I am doing right now in this chatroom, which is ranting about my opinion on a particular problem our site faces. :) Sorry about the wall of text.

Zanna

haha feel free!

it's useful to think about how and why things go badly

maybe then we can find a way to fix it in future or at least try to act in ways that mitigate it

Eliah Kagan

5:11 PM

Well anyway here's that embarrassingly wrong claim I made about escaping ' in bash, which Gilles fixed. Thank you Gilles!

I can only assume I was thinking about another language, as there are some scripting languages where \' can appear inside a '-quoted string to indicate a literal ' and not end quoting even though \ is otherwise treated literally in ' quotes. But bash is not one of them.

Zanna

I upvoted this late answer (I was reviewing late answers but someone No Action Needed it long before I finished), but should anything be done with their earlier post? I don't mind leaving it as it is

*understands after reading six times* :) quoting is confusing

haha I was talking about the edit history of the post

but I've hit the edit timeout trying to fix my quoting in chat when I want to talk about backticks and backslashes more than once

Eliah Kagan

Never mind. I can do it in posts and comments. I have no idea how quoting backticks and backslashes works in chat. All three use subtly different Markdown dialects! Either that or chat uses the same one as comments and I'm just making mistakes. Let's see... Ask Ubuntu Meta Yeah, maybe. I don't know. It supports the [word] syntax like comments.

Zanna

yeah!

@Zanna but on the other hand

Zanna

6:54 PM

XD

I don't think this is a duplicate of that question you answered - shouldn't the file be there actually?

Eliah Kagan

Yes. I don't know what the author of this comment (or its two upvoters) mean:

Apt deletes package files once they're downloaded. Is there any reason you want it to be there? — vidarlo 3 hours ago

There could be something I am missing but I cannot think of a reason the files would go away, not immediately anyway.

Zanna

I going to go and sleep. Been burning the candle at both ends. Later :)

Eliah Kagan

7:10 PM

Good night!

Btw I've commented to request clarification from the OP there. I agree it's not a dupe of that question I answered about why cached debs exist in the usual place.

Zanna

oh yeah maybe they are just looking for it incorrectly!

Eliah Kagan

8:47 PM

Here's yet another question about what to do after removing wine*. This one is with Xubuntu but I think we can still close it as a duplicate of that one.

Zanna

My comment on this question has apparently had an unexpected positive effect

Eliah Kagan

9:10 PM

Apparently so -- it looks like the OP changed which answer was accepted.

It seems like you didn't sleep for long. Please feel free to disregard this message and any others and to go back to sleep if you need more sleep! (I had been thinking that perhaps edwinskl woudl see my message about the Xubuntu wine* removing question, or that you would see it tomorrow.)

I am not sure what to do with this answer. The script (by Ayush Shrivastava) quite short and could just be added to the answer but I don't know how valuable it is. The script is, in full:

echo '#!/bin/bash' > restore
echo sudo apt-get install `grep Remove /var/log/apt/history.log | tail -1 | sed -e 's|Remove: ||g' -e 's|([^)]*)||g' -e 's|:[^ ]* ||g' -e 's|,||g'` >> restore
chmod +x restore
./restore

Transcript for

Raiders of the Lost Downboat