Question unreasonably marked as dupe

Question

Today I asked:

File `perpage.sty' not found. \MakePerPage

and with the help of a commenter, answered it.

A while later, the question was marked as a dupe of

How do I install an individual package on a Linux system?

despite the fact that:

• The question did not regard a Linux system
• The question clarified that there was no need to explain how to install individual packages
• The answer to my question involves an implicit dependency between two packages within TeXLive - a matter not addressed by answers to the supposed-dupe.

I explained some of this on the bug page, and yet - the question was marked as a dupe.

So, first, I ask for your help reopening it; but second, I am puzzled by this situation. When I was more active here on TeX.SX I did not experience this kind of over-aggressive closures.

Answer 1

There's a balance.

1. Indirection level

The fundamental goal of closing duplicate questions is to help people find the right answer by getting all of those answers in one place.

so, if a new question Q2 has an immediately-serviceable answer as an answer to an existing question Q1 (and assuming the two question are at least somewhat related etc.) - Q2 can, and perhaps should, be marked a dupe of Q1. However, if the answer to Q2 is "Take action A", and Q1 is "How do I perform action A?", then Q2 should not be marked a dupe of Q1.

In theory, it makes sense. In practice, chances are the following will happen:

• the answer to Q1 lists 5 different cases to follow.
• someone independently rewrites that for Q2, but because the new answer is less well-tested, misses some edge cases.

2. Solving the problem isn't all there is to an answer

Even though "how to install package" and "how to find the correct package name to install" together solves the problem, the information given in the new answer is still useful --- that the user is informed that the package is "supposed" to be available by default.

Summary

I think in this case, there is already a top answer that does not (incompletely) duplicate the target question, and provides useful additional information that would otherwise not be there, it should be kept.

Remember that un-logged-in users will be automatically redirected to the argument question when they click on the link e.g. from search engine result.

General clean-up

It is indeed a problem that the target question states it's Linux, which makes users (like the OP here) unhappy with the duplicate closure. Looking at the questions and the answers, I think there's no harm to edit the title of the question to say "TeX Live" instead of "Linux".

Recommendation for the OP

Instead of saying

Note: I know how to install TeXLive and individual TeXLive packages, please stop marking this as a duplicate of a question about doing that.

maybe it would be better to demonstrate it by rephrasing the question to:

I have already fixed the issue by installing tlmgr install ⟨somepackage⟩. However, I would like to know why in my default installation ⟨explain what is your default installation⟩ does the error occur, because [I assume that if footmisc needs perpage.sty - it should have installed it.].

Answer 2

What to do about OP's question?

Well, it's not a dupe of How do I install an individual package on a Linux system? - but there is a different existing question, which generalizes OP's predicament:

Find the right package for missing files in TeXlive

and its answer solves OP's problem. It would be fair to mark OP's question as a dupe of this one. But it was not until after the discussion here on meta that @UlrikeFischer pointed me there (thank you Ulrike :-) ).

Dupe-marking admonishment

Some users appear to have forgotten when questions should be marked as dupes of other questions. Quoting our help center page on the matter:

The fundamental goal of closing duplicate questions is to help people find the right answer by getting all of those answers in one place.

so, if a new question Q2 has an immediately-serviceable answer as an answer to an existing question Q1 (and assuming the two question are at least somewhat related etc.) - Q2 can, and perhaps should, be marked a dupe of Q1. However, if the answer to Q2 is "Take action A", and Q1 is "How do I perform action A?", then Q2 should not be marked a dupe of Q1.