to the closers of 377087, which has an excellent answer

Question

How to install Sentellic fspc package?

it was asked and rapidly answered. the answer was good; it was accepted.

over a month later, someone decides it's a duplicate, and several other voters agree, and so a question with a good accepted answer is closed.

now, it could be construed as a duplicate, except that the answerer took the time to 1. solve the specific problem 2. recommend a way that isn't currently in the other question.

why are we closing this??

Answer 1

Isn't this how Stack Exchange works?

The question was asked, answered as well as accepted on 14th Nov 2013. I cast the first Duplicate Closure Vote on 15th Nov 2013 on that question.

By the time, the first vote was cast, the question had already been answered as well as accepted to the satisfaction of the question asker.

The question is about unmet dependencies and we already have a canonical reference question for this in the form of following question:

• How do I resolve unmet dependencies after adding a PPA?

This is a canonical reference question for the topic because it contains all the possible solutions for the problem of unmet dependencies. Obviously, there may still be cases when the solutions given therein doesn't solve the situation. In those cases, when a new question is asked on the same topic, we let it remain open until an answer is found for it. Once, this new situation is solved, we close this new question and merge the answers with the canonical question.

So, we have already reached the stage of closing this new question. The next stage is to flag it for moderators to merge the answers with the canonical question. Why are we reopening it?

_{(While flagging for merger, there may be a situation when the answer might not make complete sense in its current form if merged with the other one. In such situations either we should edit the answer appropriately; or, if we don't have enough knowledge on the topic, leave a comment below the answer to ask if someone could edit it appropriately.)}

Answer 2

First of all none of the answers in the duplicated will help anyone to solve the same issue. You must see beyond the <pre> tags! He's asking first and foremost "How to install Sentellic fspc package?", the dependency problem was something incidental due OP's own lack of knowledge about how APT works. If I edit the question and make it look like this:

And my answer is like this:

Then is no more a duplicated. You should not close anything that says Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution) just because.

APT is very intelligent to prevent this issues, and that message doesn't appear just because. Solutions to these problems are very tricky and closing them as duplicated is not the solution. To summarize the problems with their solutions that could present this message and that "canonical" post wouldn't help are:

• OP installed something manually with dpkg -i and didn't solved the dependencies first. Solution: remove the package, install the dependencies and install the package again or use Gdebi. (This was this case)
• Mixing repositories of different releases or, worse, distribution. Solution: remove those entries from the sources.list, and rant orienting the user not to do this again. (Like this)
• Package is broken. Solution: bug report against the package maintainer. (Like this one)
• MORE!

Duplicating a question is bad if it wouldn't help anyone with the same problem (two users have upvoted the answers).