Why was a flag for migration to U&L declined when the question isn't SA related?

Question

Bear with me, I'm fuming about getting a decline flag at 665 fw, which will take about 20ish successful flags to make up.

I flagged this question for migration to U&L. It has absolutely nothing to do with systems administration other than the OP saying "I think this would be particularly useful for virtual appliances and server deployment." That cannot be the standard for allowing questions to stay on the site that are otherwise unrelated. I could pick any technology topic under the sun, ask a question, and follow up with that sentence. Someone somewhere can find anything useful, this can't be the criteria by which question relevance is judged.

Now I'm down 10 fw (which is a metric shit ton when you're at 665) and the question is still here. Why is this a more fitting place for that question than U&L?

Answer 1

I was the one who marked that as declined because I've used these tools, have seen them used in sysadmin environments, and know the use-cases behind them. Each distro does have ways of customizing deployment, and many of them have more than one way of doing so. These tools, SuseStudio is the one I'm most familiar with, go farther in that they can spit out a virtual-machine disk at the other end that can be imported to any number of hypervisors. They also have much more friendly ways of specifying packages to include (no XML-hacking!) as well as ways of packaging custom software for inclusion.

It may seem like a toy, but they're quite useful in some environments. The OP is right, they are quite useful for Virtual Appliances and Server Deployments. If you need a way to define software for a specific distro and need regular exports to an Amazon AMI for use in AWS, it can greatly shorten the work needed to make what you want happen. It's a lot more convenient than maintaining your own YUM repos and tracking dependency issues with your custom-built RPMs.

In this case, you lucked into a mod with specific domain knowledge about the question at hand :}.

Yes, this could happily exist on either ServerFault or Unix & Linux. In light of how I've seen these products used, I interpreted this question entirely topical.

Answer 2

I would hazard that 75% of the flags we get are "this belongs on $x", which is generally not a valid reason for flagging , unless the site you think it should be migrated to is not in the standard migration path (that's what vote-to-close is for. A lot of people seem to think that a mod flag is a magic hammer that gets them what they want without requiring other community involvement).

Now, obviously U&L certainly is a valid reason for flagging as "belongs on", because it's not in the standard migration path.

However, this question is definately inside a grey area. As sysadmins, we love things that make our lives easier. And the ability to pick and chose what's inside a particlar distro before installation, well that's certainly useful.

I see it analoguous to asking about Windows System Image Manager (which allows you to customise an install image before it's been installed, by adding packages and drivers, or perhaps more importantly, removing packages).

So, yes, it's about Linux, but so are what, 50% of the questions on the site, and there's a huge overlap between U&L and ServerFault and SuperUser and AskUbuntu.

So, although I had nothing to do with that particular flag, I can see why it wasn't actioned. However, I also probably wouldn't have marked as Declined because I could see the merit behind the flag (I tend to not action maybe 25%-33% of flags that come through and still mark them as Helpful, because even though I don't agree with them, I can see where the flagger was coming from).