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I started to see in the "Close Votes" review queue a bunch of questions like this:

Broken packages prevent 13.10 > 14.04 upgrade (...)

Now, this particular question has not been touched for months, so I do not believe it makes any difference if it is closed or not.

However, in the general case, should we close questions about upgrading from an EOL releases when the upgrade fails?

For the reference, there exist a similar meta question: What to do for questions on upgrading from EOL releases. The answer suggests to mark such questions as duplicates of How to install software or upgrade from an old unsupported release?

However, I believe the case here is pretty different, in that the problem can't be solved by changing the sources.list to point to old-releases.ubuntu.com.

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  • Instead of voting to close these, just downvote them so Community deletes them.
    – Braiam
    Commented Aug 25, 2015 at 12:02

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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People trying to scramble onto a supported release should be given all the help we can muster.

We shouldn't be closing them (as OT-EOL)

The parenthesis there is just to indicate that they could still be closed for other legitimate reasons. They might be an exact duplicate of an existing problem, or the quality might be far too low (and it slipped through the net the first review cycle)...

... But it's on topic.

Just had a look at the current 4 close votes:

  • 2 incorrect OT-EOL votes, and
  • 2 OT-NOREPRO votes, aka "a problem that can't be reproduced that seemingly went away on its own".

People seem to use this second reason when they think something is abandoned. The thing is the system will automatically delete questions like this (without votes or answers) after 12 months. This one only has a few months left.

So I don't see that as any reason for closing it now though. It simply shouldn't be in a review queue. It shouldn't have had the first OT-EOL registered against it. It shouldn't have had 3 more close votes. It's just a big waste of everybody's time.

I've sent the first OT-EOL voter (that started this cycle) a poke about this and I think I'll do the same with the other one now.

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  • 2
    It's also worth nothing that the question was asked just under a year ago. I haven't looked at exact dates but I highly doubt it was EoL when asked.
    – Seth Mod
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 17:44
  • I totally agree with you; what you have written was what I wanted to read :) Let's see if some one else wants to chime in the discussion, otherwise I'll accept your answer in a few days.
    – Andrea Corbellini
    Commented Aug 20, 2015 at 18:42
  • I thought that the OT-NOREPRO stuff came all from you guys (=evil mods) ;-) doing clean-up. I originally just skipped them (First 5, few months ago) but as they kept on coming, I started to VTC... Am I doing the right thing or the wrong one???
    – Fabby
    Commented Aug 27, 2015 at 22:26

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