@JennyD indubitably it has -- indeed, i upvoted the accepted answer there who knows how long ago -- but if you look at the most up-voted comments there, you'll see that this issue is quite controversial. "stop digging your hole" -- why do you all have to be so adversarial? i asked a question. i got an answer. can we all just let this go?

be careful with your vaingloriousness here, because you're risking looking like a fool. what my sys admin helped me with was not the problem i posted about on serverfault. as @Reaces points out, the sys admin helped with an initial problem, which led me to the cleanup, which is what i posted to serverfault about.

wait, on rereading, i realized you said, "your system administrator . . . knew what to do and fixed your problem for you." this is false. why do you think my system administrator fixed my problem for me? the answer i got came from SO -- and, for what it's worth, it was an answer that none of the sys admins here came up with (though the sys admins here did come up with answers that didn't work for me).

haha, a bit vainglorious (sorry, did i say a bit?), but yes, this is the answer. i have indeed been educated . . . about serverfault.com. everything in this answer had already been stated elsewhere, but this is the best summary of the relevant points.

@JennyD the best system, i think, would be to allow multi-posting, but have all the questions link to each other. but, again, this is probably a conversation that is best off held somewhere else. (what annoys me, by the way, is multi-posting on the same SE site, which i see fairly regularly.)

@Iain agreed, but those mechanisms are slow. JennyD i guess in a highly indirect way i am being rude. but i think there is another perspective here. it would be nice if these rules were a perfect fit to reality, but of course rules never are. the reality is that different people patrol different SE sites, and many times questions are suitable for multiple SE sites. posting to multiple sites is the best way to get everyone who may have an answer to see your question as quickly as possible. but i see that there are situations in which that is annoying. so i probably won't do it anymore.

i suppose responding to this would be more appropriate on yet another meta discussion, but . . . when it's unclear where a question belongs, posting to multiple sites is the most efficient way to find out. had i posted to just one site, i'd still be waiting for an answer. in fact, if the site i chose was other than SO, i might be waiting for an answer forever. i'm going to delete the versions of the question that haven't been answered. so, as far as i'm concerned (though i'm sure others will disagree), no harm, no foul.

i asked this question here, on SO, on super user, and on unix/linux. it received a great answer on SO. so yeah, it was double-dipping to try to stick it here, and i agree with the decision to close/migrate. (at the time i was fighting for it, it hadn't yet been answered elsewhere.)

for what it's worth, restoring the system to a known-good state -- i.e., the most recent back-up -- is not a good solution in this case. back-ups are made once a day. there's a lot of work i did on the day when this problematic package was installed that i don't want to lose. but i think this underscores why this question doesn't work here. that is the sort of answer an IT admin would provide. and it's a bad one for this question.

@EEAA exactamente. or SO, or super user.

@EEAA this is comparable to people who ask ELL questions on the english site and people who ask basic math questions on mathoverflow (which is meant for professional mathematicians). as for those cases, there is at least one site for amateurs where the kind of question i want to ask can be asked.

@EEAA sorry, i should have said, "why close a question when answering it is so easy?" but i guess your answer would be that you (and the other members of this site) don't want to have to answer questions like this. and it is in part because they're too easy -- i.e., because they're so easy, a professional IT admin would never ask them.

yeah, fair enough. i don't care too much to fight for this question here, as it does seem to be on-topic for a number of other SE sites. but i figured i'd fight for it a little.

@EEAA i guess my broader point is this: i understand closing questions when they can't be answered or when the required answer is so long it wouldn't be feasible for anyone to write it out. but why close a question because answering it is too easy?

@EEAA i just emailed J about how to remove the broken installation. i'll post an update here when she responds. but rather than try to guess what J would or wouldn't do, why not just give that as an answer to my question: i.e., Q: how do i remove glibc? A: don't bother. just restore the most recent known-good backup. then J might respond, "i can't, because . . ." or she might respond, "ah, yes, that worked."