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Happened upon the following sequence of events:

  • User A posts a question asking what a particular function belonging to X undocumented API does.
  • User B with a gold badge closes said question as a duplicate of another question which basically asks what the deal is with X and if we should use it.

The questions are only related in that they both involve X.

Is this a legitimate use of duplication?

I have read Is it bad to answer "Don't do this, it is bad Android design"? and Is "Don't do it" a valid answer?, but those do not exactly apply. The new question can't be answered by posting an answer to the old question.

In this case, it looked to me like a way to tell the poster not to use a feature and close the question. I've seen some discussion e.g. Are debugging questions about unsupported API calls inherently off-topic? that indicated questions about unsupported/undocumented API can be answered besides "don't use it".

New question:

new question

Marked as a duplicate of:

Q:

old question

A:

old answer

I could provide a link to the actual Q&A if it's desired but my intention was not to single out this user, just ask if there is a consensus on this action.

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  • 3
    I don't think that duplicate link makes sense. Technically the OP hasn't stated that want to USE the internal method, just that they want to know what it does. There is also already a comment that would be the best answer which explains a safe way of accomplishing what that method does.
    – JasonMArcher
    Commented Apr 27, 2015 at 17:13
  • @rene I don't think it's a viable option in this case. (I've edited with screens to clarify.)
    – Radiodef
    Commented Apr 27, 2015 at 17:14
  • @Radiodef Hmm, answer could still be the same ... but I see why it is a longshot to call that a dupe.
    – rene
    Commented Apr 27, 2015 at 17:24
  • 3
    Not sure why you're posting screenshots?!
    – Lightness Races in Orbit
    Commented Apr 27, 2015 at 20:55
  • 1
    @LightningRacisinObrit I didn't want to cause some sort of drama. :/ That's all.
    – Radiodef
    Commented Apr 27, 2015 at 21:03

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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In general, answers to a duplicate target is irrelevant for determining if the questions are duplicates. If the answer to a duplicate target is not satisfactory, the solution is to write a better answer on the duplicate target, not have one version of the question with a good answer and another version with a bad answer.

However, in this case I think that this is not a duplicate. The older question asks about the history of and replacements for sun.* packages. In the new question, the OP asks about the behavior of a particular method that happens to be in a sun.* package.

For a practical example of how they are different, suppose the asker (of the new question) wants to hack on the JVM itself. This is completely valid question, and telling an aspiring JVM hacker, "This method is for internal JVM use only," is not relevant (if the asker is planning to use it for internal JVM use!) and doesn't answer the question. I'm not saying that that's what the OP plans to do in this case, but the question is phrased in a way that is intent-agnostic, so it could be perfectly valuable to a future reader who wishes to dissect and modify the JVM.

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    It could also be useful for someone trying to clean up some old code using the deprecated method (though if that was the asker's intent, they might get better answers posting a snippet of the method's use).
    – Jeffrey Bosboom
    Commented Apr 27, 2015 at 18:47

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