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I have a question about my Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange post: apt-get update gives me errors with mirrordirector.raspbian.org

I answered the question yesterday. I had a similar problem and the response from others gave me a clue that I should look in /etc/apt/sources.list. As it was a new image after the earlier one crashed I thought there could be problem with the SD card. However, I went to the sources.list and I was surprised to find a line saying: "Uncomment the following line before trying to update" or similar. So when I did that I could update and install apache2 etc. without problems. I responded immediately and posted an answer. However, the post was removed within a few minutes and my name (along with one more) was greyed out. I shall be happy to know why it has happened as I would like to avoid such embarrassing situations in future. Thanks in advance.

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I apologize and have undeleted your answer. I also edited it substantially, not so much because the original was incorrect, but so that it makes more sense in context. Hopefully some of that is self-explanatory and the rest I'll try to clear up here.

My original comment, that "this is exactly the same as at least a few of the existing answers" is sort of true, but it may not appear that way to people who actually need help with the problem, and there is in fact one substantial difference that I overlooked, the jessie vs. wheezy thing, which I edited in explicitly. So again, I apologize and admit my mistake.

I sometimes watch new answers to old questions for posts from brand new users which are not answers. The most common form of this is something along the lines of "I have this problem too, have you solved it yet?". These are sometimes caught and flagged by the system or other users as well.

Yours was not that, but it did appear at first glance to be just repeating what had been said by various other people in that Q&A -- and the entire Q&A is generally a disaster (note there are four other deleted answers there most people cannot see), and that is not your fault.

I'm inclined to delete the entire thing as obsolete, however, the standard practice on Stack Exchange is to leave obsoleted questions and answers because people must still sometimes solve problems involving obsolete systems/software/what-have-you. There's also the issue of fairness, since deleting a post means the author loses reputation points that he or she legitimately earned.

This issue is by nature particularly problematic for us, and is becoming more so as time goes by. At least one or two users with editing privileges here taken it upon themselves to deal with this by adding notes where appropriate, and in fact I've followed that model and done the same thing to a few of the answers there:

Please note this answer is out-of-date and the current version of Raspbian is jessie, not wheezy. Make sure of which one you are using before you do anything.

This seems like a reasonable solution -- thanks to Milliways, who was the first person I noticed doing this a month or so ago. I intend to start a discussion dedicated to the issue here when I find time.

Anyway, sorry again and welcome to RaspberryPi.SE and the Stack Exchange network in general!

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