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Background: There has been an ongoing issue in the Ruby community with the 'ruby-debug' gem, which hasn't worked on the latest version of ruby (1.9.3) without some severe workarounds (installing a 'prerelease' version of a gem from some source other than rubygems.org). You can find numerous questions discussing this problem by searching for "ruby-debug19 1.9.3", most of which list the same convoluted workarounds.

Yesterdayish, a kind person forked ruby-debug into a version that works "out of the box", such that most people's issues can now be solved by using the 'debugger' gem instead of 'ruby-debug'. I found about this via a Twitter search, and wanted to spread my knowedge to SO (which is where you're likely to land if you google "ruby-debug19 1.9.3")

I posted answers on the following questions, only to find them deleted a couple of hours later:

  1. Rails 3.1 and Ruby 1.9.3p125: ruby-debug19 still crashes with "Symbol not found: _ruby_threadptr_data_type" -- where my answer already had an upvote before being deleted

  2. ruby-debug19 on ruby-1.9.3-preview1 -- which is admittedly the same text as #1

  3. Cannot use ruby-debug19 with 1.9.3-p0? -- which differs from #1/#2 (command line syntax vs gemfile)

Another user has also been posting answers on other ruby-debug questions advocating for the new debugger fork, which were not deleted:

I would love to vote those answers up, but the one rep increase I've ever received was deleted with my answers :)

It may bear mentioning that I have nothing to do with this fork and it simply solved a problem I have had in an elegant way.

I can only presume that my answers were deleted because:

  1. I have only 1 reputation
  2. Two of my answers were exact duplicates

If it's #2, I would be fine with just one of them being deleted, but why all three? If I did something else wrong that I haven't thought of, I would love to know what it is!

I flagged one of the deleted questions for moderation but have no way to see what progress that is or isn't making.

Getting an answer deleted is very unsettling for me as a contributor. I have no information about why they were deleted, only a boilerplate "read the faq" and the deleter's name. If my answer wasn't great, why not leave it to the voting process to determine where it should land?

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I can assure you that it's not #1. –  Daniel Fischer Apr 5 '12 at 21:40
It's those crazy moderators! They're at it again! –  Cody Gray Apr 6 '12 at 3:05
There's a link on the numbers in your SO profile next to "helpful flags" that leads to feedback on your declined flag. The answer to this was given there. –  Bill the Lizard Apr 6 '12 at 14:03

1 Answer 1

up vote 9 down vote accepted

Exact or duplicate answers are automatically flagged by the system, and they get acted upon. We don't tend to like people posting the exact same thing on multiple questions. If they can really be answered with the exact same thing, they should be closed as duplicates and only one of the answers should exist. Rather than posting exact answers, why don't you just flag the questions you believe are duplicates so they can be closed properly? Then they'll all point to the single question where you can post your answer. I'm sure once this gets done, a moderator will undelete the answer for that one question.

share|improve this answer
Which is exactly what I told him when he messaged me on Twitter about it (except I did it in less than 140 characters *smiles*) –  casperOne Apr 5 '12 at 21:47
I would love to flag questions for all sorts of attention, but I was under the impression that you can't do so without at least 15 rep. casperOne, if this was indeed your reasoning, can you at least undelete the two versions of my answer that weren't duplicates? I promise I'll delete the copy and paste buttons off of my computer. –  tjgrathwell Apr 5 '12 at 22:02
@tjgrathwell casper might not see your reply, use @ to notify like I just did. –  Shadow Wizard Apr 5 '12 at 22:27
Oh no, but now I can't edit that comment... @casperOne I summon thee! –  tjgrathwell Apr 5 '12 at 22:51
This isn't the only person who's been heavily promoting that fork today either. There were something like nine duplicates in the flag queue just now for the same link from the same person. –  Flexo Apr 6 '12 at 0:55
@tjgrathwell Can you list out the questions that should be duplicates based on your answers? I'll leave the answer on the one that is not the dupe and close the others. –  casperOne Apr 6 '12 at 3:02
@casperOne I think the first one I mentioned here ( stackoverflow.com/questions/9442200 ) should stay, as it mentions the version of Ruby people would be most likely to install today (p125 -- the others talk about 'preview' or 'p0'). All the others questions I mentioned in my meta question are more or less duplicates of that ("ruby-debug won't install!") but include subtly different failures or different usages of ruby-debug. –  tjgrathwell Apr 6 '12 at 3:59
@tjgrathwell Done. All the others (and the other ones with a similar answer) are now dupes of that one, and I've undeleted your answer there. Next time, put one answer please and flag the rest as dupes. You should have the rep now. –  casperOne Apr 6 '12 at 4:18

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