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Should I delete my trivial, lack-of-research question?
I asked this trivial question recently:
DocuSign eSignature API SDK: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError errors.
It turns out, my problem was because I did not do enough research before asking a question. I was new to Maven and did not know that I have to click "Update Project" to install dependencies.
I answered my own question and added "maven" tag, but now I am not sure if I should just delete this question because it is trivial - now that I know the answer - and I am not sure if it's particularly useful to the people of the future.
I saw this post Questions easily answered by studying a beginner-level book, but I still wanted to ask community's opinion about this.
3 answers
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I agree with Dirk Herrmann's answer about this:
What if a question is beginner level? I would say: Someone should answer it.
Some of the beginner level questions on stackoverflow have received answers that explain things in wonderful ways.
While your question seems trivial for a seasoned Java developer, the issue is not obvious for beginners.
It happens that I am a .NET developer that toyed just a little with a Maven project some months ago. In .NET World (Visual Studio, Rider, etc.), dependencies are managed in a more automatic way and when adding a packet, all its dependencies are automatically added to the project. It was very strange when in Java it is pretty easy to miss some dependencies required by your dependencies. Not to mention that I had to often check the pom.xml file due to dependency-related errors.
My suggestion is to keep the question as it might help other folks in the future.
I don't think the question is trivial. Maven is very complex and confusing at first. The documentation is also quite something. It's not easy to figure out what's going on unless you already know. Your question explains a valuable thing.
My real concern is discoverability:
- It has nothing to do with docusign API
- It has nothing to do with your code sample - but the important point is, "the app seems to complain about phantom code that doesn't exist"
- The errors you quoted are not characteristic - forgetting to update the project is basically a random error generator, and it could be anything
So how would other people who forgot to update the project find this question, instead of reasking? Will it just be an endless cycle of new users asking yet another variation on the same, and power users closing as duplicate?
Based on the logic in another post I made, I would say the solution here is to find a question titled something like "What are general troubleshooting steps when a Java program is not working as expected?" (create it if it doesn't exist) and add an item to that list called "make sure you've updated your project".
This would require first having at least a semi-consensus in the community that it's okay to ask broad, open-ended, collaborative list-style questions.
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I agree with the previous answers, don't delete a question that you find it looking trivial after you find the answer, instead answer it, and if it's possible, improve the question, i.e., by providing relevant details about the context that might explain why you skipped what you be sharing in the answer.
IMO, only blatantly off-topic, "broken windows" (something that attracts bad posts, causing more harm than good) and very badly received posts should be deleted. I understand that sometimes closed questions should be deleted when the OP doesn't know how to improve to question to be reopened or what was learned after posting the question leads to "rewrite" it as a different question.
If you already know the software development basics and faced challenges learning a new platform, SDK, etc., others might find your learnings helpful. Software development is a very broad topic, and software developers have to be able to quickly catch the workings of platforms, methods, tools, etc., either because they are new or they are continually changing.
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