question about "download[ing] packages for offline installation" incorrectly closed as duplicate

Question

This question has been closed as a duplicate of this question. But I do not believe they are really asking the same thing. I think that the recent question is asked in a way that is unfortunately not specific enough for that to be obvious to everyone, but I would recommend that the question be edited and reopened. I'm not sure if the right place for me to discuss this is here in meta, or in comments to the question, but I figure I'll play it safe and post here first. While I'm aware of closed questions being reopened with editing following discussion, I'm not familiar with any situations where this has happened to questions marked as duplicates (without prior discussion in meta).

Muhammad Qasim, who asked the recently posted question, had just previously asked about how to install a minimal GUI on an Ubuntu Server system. One of the answers suggested to use sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop --no-install-recommends. Since he did not indicate an inability to do this, and since he posted part of that command in his second, recently closed question, there is no reason to think the machine he is using doesn't have an Internet connection. Instead, it looks like he wants to avoid downloading all the same .deb files when either starting over from scratch on the same machine, or setting up other machines similarly. For that purpose, an offline package management utility like Keryx (as suggested in the accepted (and most popular) answer to the question of which Muhammad Qasim's has been marked a duplicate) would likely be extreme overkill (whereas it is clearly the best solution to the problem it was written in response to). And if an offline package management utility turns out to be the best solution for Muhammad Qasim, it's likely that something like apt-offline will be preferable, because his machine will not be using a GUI all the time.

For these reasons, it seems to me that this recent question is asking something different from this previous question, that the best answers are likely quite different, and thus that they should not be considered duplicates.

Answer 1

I agree with you on all the points except where you say it is not a duplicate. If the user posts an comment in the original question asking for an text based offline solution there will probably be an answer there in the next day that will help him. If not he can create or ask to create a bounty that will attract 1 zillion answer to what ever is written on that bounty.

His question is a duplicate, only the best accepted solution posted on the first question will not fit him.

If you want to really help out ask him to post an comment on the original question, if you can, answer it with a nice guide, if you cant answer it, post his comment in the general chat from askubuntu. Someone will create a help guide for text based offline installs eventually and if fits for him will fit to many others thus making the original question more valid and the information all fitted "under one roof" instead of distributed.

Just because a question is centralized and an answer accepted as the most valid one does not render the original question useless for users that have only minor changes. In this case its only the GUI/text change, there are solutions for both, why not include them under the same question if that is a generalized one?

Plus there are already solutions on the original question that can actually help him, the USB mirror one will fit either GUI and text based systems. If you have another solution that you want to purpose you can add it to the original question and point the user to it.