[HN Gopher] Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
Why does man print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30? (2017)
Author : yankcrime
Score : 393 points
Date : 2021-07-29 08:31 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unix.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (unix.stackexchange.com)
| smcl wrote:
| There's some nice examples of something I've noticed - where you
| have a _very_ clear issue and people pick away at stuff that 's
| orthogonal to the issue and won't resolve anything. The question
| is clear, "gimme gimme gimme" is printed to stderr, it's not
| expected and we'd like to know why ... but there's comments like:
|
| - "Why does your test script call man where it should fail?"
|
| - "why do you need to do a 'man -w' every minutes?"
|
| I get that there's a bit of mistrust in some things users report
| so in some cases we as developers need to be careful to establish
| the user's actual intent or whether they're describing their
| issue correctly. But this isn't one of those cases.
| lwerdna wrote:
| Thanks for articulating this. I call them XY inquisitors. We
| had a couple at work a few years ago and any question directed
| at them was met with a somewhat derisive "What are you trying
| to DO?".
|
| Of course there are cases where the question poser of Y
| benefits from having their X identified, an archetypal case
| here:
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2691018/decimalformat-an...
| moralestapia wrote:
| And that's not even an XY example ...
|
| You guys are so confused you don't even get yourselves.
| SamBam wrote:
| Sure it was. But it was a _good_ example, because the
| person helpfully starts with "I'm trying to do X."
|
| But they still say. "I'm trying to do X. To do this, I'm
| doing this complicated Y. How come Y doesn't work?"
|
| This is still XY because they're asking about Y. But in the
| bad cases, they'd _only_ mention the Y part, and omit that
| they 're trying to do X.
| moralestapia wrote:
| The XY problem is "I'm trying to do Y" -> "Are you sure
| you don't want X?"
|
| This is "I'm trying to do X" -> "Here's how you do X"
| lwerdna wrote:
| When you accuse someone of being wrong, it's helpful to
| provide justification, not insults.
|
| Y: How do I strip unnecessary symbols after a decimal
| point?
|
| X: How do I round a number to a desired precision?
|
| It looks like the perfect example of XY problem to me.
| Please tell me how I'm confused.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Your Y is not a different problem, it's just a poorly
| worded description of X.
|
| In an XY-problem situation, X and Y are different
| problems.
| lwerdna wrote:
| They are different problems. Stripping the final
| character from "3.14159" does not produce the same result
| as rounding to 3.1416.
|
| The first action concerns a syntactic property of PI's
| decimal _representation_ while the second action concerns
| a semantic property of PI 's _value_.
|
| A related example given on https://xyproblem.info is a
| user asking (Y) how to extract the final 3 characters of
| a filename string when he probably intends to ask (X) how
| to retrieve a filename's extension.
| noptd wrote:
| Agreed. IMO StackOverflow would be greatly improved if they
| implemented a rule barring these responses unless they first
| answer the actual question at hand.
|
| To build off of another user's example, answering
|
| >"If I eat pizza in the morning, why does it taste metallic?"
|
| with
|
| >"Because of a chemical reaction due to blah blah blah... which
| raises the question- why are you eating pizza for breakfast
| anyways? Avocado toast is superior for <reasons>"
|
| Would be far more productive of a response for both cohorts of
| users; those searching for the direct answer and those
| searching for a better solution of what to have for breakfast.
| jl6 wrote:
| I think it's similar to how experienced users access consumer
| support processes. When you call a support line, you might know
| exactly what you want, and just want to be routed to the
| process you know you need, but 95% of customers _are_ better
| served by being put through the "have you tried turning it off
| and on again" process.
|
| Similarly on Stackoverflow, a majority of users probably _are_
| doing it wrong and are helped by the XY-troubleshooting
| approach.
|
| Experienced users who really do want X end up being collateral
| damage.
| latexr wrote:
| Before applying an XY troubleshooting approach, one should
| learn to recognise XY problems. While some cases may be
| ambiguous, I'd argue this one isn't.
| jamincan wrote:
| Sometimes experienced users are also served well by walking
| through the steps. At least at our company, you see field
| technicians who _think_ they know what is happening and try
| to short-circuit the troubleshooting process. Sometimes they
| are correct, but oftentimes they miss a significant detail
| that they would have caught if they had just followed the
| normal procedure.
| Ballas wrote:
| Well, in this case I would also like to know, out of pure
| curiosity. I cannot come up with a viable reason on my own why
| you would run 'man -w' as part of a test.
| jmiserez wrote:
| Verifying you have your environment and search paths setup
| correctly.
|
| From the man page:
|
| > _-w, --where, --path, --location
|
| Don't actually display the manual page, but do print the
| location of the source nroff file that would be formatted._
| loopz wrote:
| Why would you even ask such a question to begin with? You say
| curiosity, but there seems to be more to it?
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Asking why to a part of code or workflow is a good thing,
| even only because of curiosity. After knowing it, you may
| find the reasoning brilliant, or ridiculous and dismiss it
| and that's it.
|
| However if any chance you have the same situation as OP, it
| may come out valuable, either currently or in the future.
| klyrs wrote:
| I would have asked the same question for the same reason. A
| sibling comment introduced me to a feature that I wasn't
| familiar with. And that's why I'll continue asking curious
| questions until the day I die.
| gpvos wrote:
| Why would there be more to it? I wanted to ask the same
| question, just because I simply did not know the answer. In
| fact, I am curious how you became so wary about such a
| simple, uncomplicated and direct question.
| loopz wrote:
| It was meant as joke, question the questioneer, for an
| honorary -4.
| btbuildem wrote:
| It's a bit of a Stackoverflow trope, so much so that it shows
| up in these "parody questions" that surface from time to time.
|
| In some cases the people answering have the experience and
| breadth of knowledge to understand the "real" question being
| asked, even if the OP doesn't quite have it yet. Other cases,
| it seems like arrogance and showboating, and doesn't contribute
| much where a simple direct answer would be best.
|
| The one that gets me is seeing an answered question, with a
| bajillion upvotes, locked by mods as "off topic" or "not
| useful" or whatever. Clearly a relevant question with a useful
| answer, as evidenced by the many comments and kudos. Ugh.
| cm2187 wrote:
| It can be useful. I remember asking about a problem I ran into
| in a convoluted solution and someone suggested I should try a
| much simpler solution which was actually a better idea.
| Semiapies wrote:
| It can be, if the people involved are knowledgeable. In this
| case and a distressing number of other cases, it's clear the
| people piping up have no idea what's going on (and some
| aren't even paying attention when reading the initial
| question). They're _imitating_ what knowledgeable people do
| to feel like they 're contributing.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| People prefer problems they know the answer to. Sometimes, when
| they don't know the answer to a problem, they'll try to cram it
| into a shape they recognize so the answer they already have
| works.
| Semiapies wrote:
| I think that's much more the case than the whole "XY" issue.
| It's clear the people asking "clarifying" questions about the
| workflow didn't have the slightest idea that man did that,
| much less why. But they can't get points or a feeling of
| accomplishment from recognizing that they're out of their
| depth and staying out of the discussion.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| I think it is something like the old joke where you tell the
| doctor that it hurts when you do something and the doctor says
| stop doing it. Often, we can eliminate the problem by factoring
| it out altogether. In this case people observed the problem to
| be solved as a failing test case. The author could have avoided
| being ask why by just stating the facts and not trying to
| explain why he observed it.
| Semiapies wrote:
| No, they'd ask twice as many questions in that case.
| panzagl wrote:
| I like to read the reasoning behind things that appear to be
| spurious because sometimes it turns out they have a good reason
| for doing it that I haven't considered, and it might be
| something I want to incorporate in my practices.
| matsemann wrote:
| I get why people ask questions like that. Many questions on SO
| are often weird because of the XY problem [0]. Someone asks for
| X, people answering think doing X is really weird and
| difficult, and thus dig a bit more. They then find that the
| asker really wants to achieve Y which is simple to do.
|
| [0]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-
| the-x...
| staticassertion wrote:
| The people who answer Y without addressing X are far more
| annoying and detrimental than the people asking X.
|
| If you see a likely XY problem, answer X, then explain why
| they might want Y, and then answer Y.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I personally hate when that happens because usually I really
| want to do X for good reasons. In the end the people asking
| got help on troubleshooting their specific problem, but the
| question is still unanswered (or answered by "You don't want
| to do that because you're a beginner").
| patrickthebold wrote:
| I'm the opposite. I often catch myself asking about Y and
| then needing to back up and ask about X. I even know the
| problem by name and can't help (occasionally) asking the
| wrong question.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I don't disagree, but then the question should be phrased
| that way, or it should be mentioned than there may be
| better way for generic use cases but the original
| question still answered.
| shawnz wrote:
| If you are so unfamiliar with X that you require the advice
| of experts to implement it, then how can you say so
| confidently that the reasons to do X instead of Y are
| justified, even though those experts disagree?
|
| If it's really true that the conventional wisdom about Y is
| just wrong, and X really is better in some cases, then it
| will be a long process to get all the experts to reconsider
| their assumptions, requiring battle-tested proof, and that
| probably won't happen in a single SO thread.
| tarsinge wrote:
| I'm not unfamiliar with the problem space and why I want
| to do X, I'm just looking on implementation details. If
| the question was "How should I solve that problem? Should
| I use X?", then sure "use Y instead because it's a better
| practice" would be a valid answer.
| kosievdmerwe wrote:
| Reminds me of the time I asked "How can I do this Python
| feature in one-line because I'm writing a to-one-line
| Python transformer".
|
| Still got idiots replying that I shouldn't be doing what I
| want to do in one line.
| skohan wrote:
| I find this frustrating because I often want exactly
| matsemann wrote:
| Yeah, I get that as well and sometimes feel the same. The
| difference is that a beginner tries to do Y, fails, think
| they can solve it by doing subtask X, so they ask X. But us
| with more experience know why Y didn't work and probably
| have a good reason for asking X.
|
| But the answerers cannot know that. So adding a small
| snippet of what have been tried, or why X specific is
| what's needed is a good idea to steer the conversation in
| the correct direction.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| In my experience, if you tell people your use case for
| wanting to do X instead of Y, they'll just attack your
| use case instead.
|
| I, for one, never use places like SO anymore because
| everyone just wants to pretend you really want Y, because
| that's an answer they know.
| dkarl wrote:
| I use SO all the time for gleaning information from the
| answers, but never for asking questions, for this very
| reason. The questions that show up in search results are
| full of great answers and information, but mine ended up
| full of people who didn't know the answer to my question
| but were eager to tell me about something they did know.
| Then I'd put more and more effort into providing context
| and justifying the question, until eventually the answers
| dried up. I decided I was better off seeking help on
| mailing lists, issue trackers, chat rooms, etc.
| praptak wrote:
| Then specify the context as part of your question: "I want
| X. I think alternative solutions like Y won't work
| because...". As it is with many things in life the more
| effort you invest in the question, the greater the returns
| :)
|
| Although tbh I quite often want the opposite, so I add
| "Alternative solutions/workarounds welcome" or "I don't see
| how I can avoid doing X but maybe..."
| Draken93 wrote:
| The point is that SO is actually less about the person
| asking a question. That is only one person.
|
| But people look for already asked questions by searching
| for them. And I don't think that there are many things
| that are more frustrating, then finding a questions that
| describes your problem X perfectly and it has only
| answers to Y.
| shawnz wrote:
| Since SO exists for the readers and not just the asker, I
| think that makes it even more important to highlight all
| the reasons not to do X if it really is unlikely to be
| the best solution.
|
| Maybe the asker really would be best suited with X due to
| some contrived circumstance, but is that true of everyone
| else who finds the thread too? Probably not.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > "I want X. I think alternative solutions like Y won't
| work because..."
|
| Listing all of the things you don't want to do would not
| only take up more words and effort than the question
| about what you do want to do, but is hopeless. Somebody
| who doesn't know the answer to your question but still
| wants to comment will find something that you were
| unaware you didn't want to do.
|
| It's better just to answer questions directly, and then
| when somebody uses that solution and it doesn't get them
| closer to the solution to their _real_ problem, they 'll
| ask a better question.
| mixedCase wrote:
| Sorry, but that doesn't make sense and sounds like a
| rationalization for being lazy with the question. You're
| worrying about a straw man instead of trying to help out
| people who do know how to deal with the actual problem
| you have.
|
| And bad solutions can still "solve" problems with
| horrible trade-offs, so instead of searching again for a
| better solution people may just employ the worse one
| unaware of the better possibilities, consequences be
| damned.
| latexr wrote:
| The XY problem applies when someone asks _how to accomplish
| something_. In this case they want to know _why something
| happens_ ; what they're doing around it is irrelevant.
|
| It's analogous to asking "why does pizza taste metallic to
| me?" and getting "why are you eating pizza?" as a reply.
| matsemann wrote:
| No, the pizza analogy doesn't work. It's the specific use
| of man here being questioned ("why is it used in a test?"),
| not man usage in general.
| Draken93 wrote:
| Oh it actually does. Making it specific doesn't change
| anything:
|
| When I am asking: "Whenever I eat pizza in the morning,
| it tastes metallic to me. Has anyone an idea why that
| could be?"
|
| I dont want someone to answer: "Why are you eating pizza
| for breakfast?"
|
| This answer is worth nothing. Actually its even worse,
| cause answering it costs time.
| matsemann wrote:
| > _Making it specific doesn 't change anything_
|
| Of course it doesn't, when your "specific" analogy isn't
| nearly analogous to the situation.
| arua442 wrote:
| I actually agree with him, it's a perfect analogy.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Worth nothing to the asker. But stack exchange is a two-
| way communications platform, and responders (and other
| readers) may want to know more context.
|
| I, for one, am still curious why OP is running a test
| where they call `man` with no input and fail on different
| stderr.
| jameshart wrote:
| Calling man in a test and expecting the output to match
| some particular value is a much weirder thing to do with
| man than eating pizza in the morning.
|
| It is honestly a lot more likely that the reason man is
| outputting 'gimme gimme gimme' at a particular time of
| day is something to do with your crazy test setup than
| that it is a feature of man.
|
| So for the pizza analogy, think of it more as 'pizza
| sometimes tastes metallic to me when I cook it under the
| hood of my car'. The car situation seems likely to be
| relevant. It would be surprising, when someone asks a
| question like that, to discover that it's actually
| because the frozen pizzas they buy when they drive to the
| parking lot where they then cook them under their car
| hood actually contain iron filings that were put there
| deliberately by the manufacturer.
| rfrey wrote:
| The analogy is completely fine. "Why does the pineapple
| on my pizza taste metallic"? "You shouldn't put pineapple
| on your pizza" if the original bothers you.
| johnbcoughlin wrote:
| Why does pizza taste metallic to me when I eat it on a
| boat?
| [deleted]
| latexr wrote:
| Analogies don't have to be one-to-one. It's close-- _and
| simple_ --enough to get the larger point across.
| matsemann wrote:
| It doesn't, though. As I see why asking "why are you
| eating pizza is wrong", but not why asking "why are you
| using man in your tests" is wrong. So your analogy is
| more of a misrepresentation of the situation than
| anything else.
|
| If you don't want focus on the details, then don't
| provide them. If you provide them, it has to be because
| you think they might be relevant. And then it's relevant
| for people to ask for further details.
| latexr wrote:
| > As I see why asking "why are you eating pizza is
| wrong", but not why asking "why are you using man in your
| tests" is wrong. So your analogy is more of a
| misrepresentation of the situation than anything else.
|
| So far you seem to be the only one failing to grasp the
| original point. Your misunderstanding of the analogy does
| not transform it into a misrepresentation.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| It's analogous because the existence of tests have
| absolutely nothing to do with the question at all.
| shawnz wrote:
| Despite the wording of the question I think it's pretty
| clear the real intention is to get their tests working. And
| even then, the top answers do in fact directly answer the
| question as asked.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| This due to the use of "why" and "because" in English to
| introduce explanations that are fundamentally different and
| grammatically differentiated in other languages. One is a
| cause, as in the antecedent cause of a consequent effect,
| while the other is a purpose, the effect desired prior to
| undertaking an action. This is the difference between
| etiology and teleology, which many students fail to grasp.
| "Why does man print this?" asks for a cause, while "Why are
| you using man in a test?" asks for a purpose.
| rticesterp wrote:
| Isn't the better analogy that, "If I take aspirin with
| water for a hangover it works but if I take it with whiskey
| it makes the hangover worse. Why doesn't aspirin work with
| whiskey?"
|
| I would definitely ask them why they think they need to
| take aspirin with whiskey for their hangover.
| jancsika wrote:
| No, it's more like, "Why do people literally float a few
| inches off the ground when they lick an aspirin then take
| a sip of whiskey?"
|
| If that input indeed did cause that result, you'd expect
| a forum of human beings to have responses like this:
|
| "Holy shit that result was most surprising! I have to re-
| evaluate my entire life now. Just curious, though-- what
| made you decide to lick aspirin and sip whiskey?"
|
| Any response that didn't explicitly confirm the result
| would be signalling to the world that they are either a
| troll or a boring contrarian.
|
| Similarly, `man` isn't ever supposed to output `gimme
| gimme gimme` as reported. That is surprising behavior.
| And that surprising behavior is trivially reproducible by
| the likely harmless act of setting your machine to the
| time specified and running it.
|
| Thus, the fact that this reported case was _actually_ a
| feature of `man` outs all the people who posted non-
| sequiturs as low-effort cranks. (Low-effort because they
| didn 't even take the time to run a trivial test.)
|
| Edit: just to be completist about it-- I suppose a
| respondent in either case could simply challenge the
| veracity of the report. But that's not what we're talking
| about here AFAICT.
|
| Edit: to make a steelman argument here-- maybe not
| cranks, but people who have, for whatever reason, fallen
| prey to the act of low-effort crankiness.
| SamBam wrote:
| And yet I think the probing XY questions are _still_
| important.
|
| The answer _could_ have been simply: "It's an easter
| egg. It's from an Abba song." Done. End of discussion, it
| answered the question.
|
| But by probing how the user wanted the thing to work, and
| why it was breaking his tests, and that it was actually
| happening when he used `man -w`, the maintainer actually
| understood that it was not a harmless easter egg, and
| fixed it so it didn't happen when called with -w.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| That may be true but it often ruins StackOverflow as a
| repository of answers. There's nothing worse than actually
| needing to do X only to find a StackOverflow page where 10
| different answers give 10 different Ys.
|
| Or when X needs to be done but instead all the comments
| hector the question with useless criticism.
| yura wrote:
| You say it ruins it, but my in my opinion, that's exactly
| what makes SO valuable. Often, it's not just the asker of
| the question that's trying to solve X but asks how to solve
| Y. So when you search on how to solve Y, you might also
| find out a better way to solve X that doesn't involve
| solving Y.
|
| And if you are really trying to solve Y, it's not hard to
| specify that in your question (I know I can solve X without
| solving Y, but I don't want to solve X, I want is to solve
| Y in this case). I wouldn't say "there's nothing worse"
| than that; it's a minor inconvenience.
| SamBam wrote:
| I agree. If I'm _sure_ my problem is not an XY problem,
| but I think it may well not _look_ like that because it
| 's such a weird situation, I will add all the context
| that explains how I got there.
|
| Then either: I do know what I'm doing, and my explanation
| satisfies people, and they try to work on Y, or: it turns
| out I was indeed wrong, and I should have solved X some
| other way.
|
| Either way it's a win for me (if anyone bothers to answer
| the question).
|
| But it can be hard for either new people, or people who
| don't know the domain well enough to even know that it
| _could_ be an XY problem.
| craftinator wrote:
| Why don't they just filter out the useless Y's, but keep
| the good ones?
| oefrha wrote:
| Yeah, unfortunately, these days SO is relatively good for
| shallow questions but mostly terrible for niche questions
| when you're already at an advanced level on the topic.
| Often enough you get several inquiries about your use case
| from people at or maybe even below your level who can't
| really answer the niche question, you waste time explaining
| irrelevant details and fending off skepticism, and end up
| leaving without an answer.
| abathur wrote:
| I still occasionally post these _when they aren't urgent_
| because there's an off chance someone will know, and a
| greater chance some future traveller will find it by
| search and turn up with a good thought or answer.
|
| But yes, it can be a lonely game :)
| matsemann wrote:
| It's also encouraged to answer your own questions. So if
| you struggle with something, and find a solution, you can
| post the Q and answer at the same time even. To make it
| easier for others in the future.
| shawnz wrote:
| If a subject matter expert thinks that people asking for X
| are falling victim to the XY problem, then I want to hear
| about it before I go down the mistaken road of implementing
| X.
|
| If there truly is a circumstance which makes X the right
| solution, then that might warrant a new question being
| posted with the additional context to make that so. But I
| suspect it's much more often the case that the asker is
| simply being stubborn and doesn't want to change their
| plans.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| But the new question almost always gets closed as a dupe
| in spite of clarification.
| shawnz wrote:
| Yes, I could agree with you there. I'm not going to
| defend the stickler moderators on there (just look how
| they shut down the interesting comments on the top
| answer).
| ballenf wrote:
| There are places to ask the question "I think I need X.
| Is there a better solution?"
|
| But the answer to the question "How to do X?" really
| shouldn't include more than a passing reference to
| "Here's how to do Y." If X is impossible, then that is of
| course the answer.
|
| And as others have indicated, the most frustrating
| scenario that happens over and over is that once the "How
| to do X" question is asked, you can never get an answer
| to that question if the original poster relents and
| agrees that what they really need is an answer to "how to
| do Y?".
| shawnz wrote:
| Imagine the question is something like "How do I
| concatenate these strings into an SQL query?"
|
| Would you be willing to be responsible for the fallout of
| answering that question any other way besides "use
| parameterized queries instead"? Do you really think that
| should only be mentioned as a passing reference?
| cperciva wrote:
| You seem to be under the impression that people answering
| questions on SO are subject matter experts.
| robinson7d wrote:
| You're correct that they often aren't, but all the same I
| find it amusing to read this comment attached to a
| StackOverflow link where the exact person who suggested
| "gimme gimme gimme" and the implementer both answered.
|
| Obviously not the ones making the "why are you $X"
| comments in this case though.
| shawnz wrote:
| Remember the name of the site that SO replaced, "Experts
| Exchange".
|
| Obviously it's possible for non-experts to post
| authoritative-sounding answers on questions that they
| don't really understand, but I think that is a different
| category of problem from the "XY-problem" style answers.
| fegu wrote:
| I always read their domain name as expert sex change.
| bjowen wrote:
| This is also why the canonical answer of turning it off and
| on again is a meme.
| don-code wrote:
| I've been learning to recognize when I've been presented with
| a solution, rather than a need. Often times the solution
| answers the need, but lacks knowledge of either side effects,
| implementation time needed, holes in leaky abstractions, or
| something else that makes it less than ideal. Walking back to
| the need helps in proposing a better solution.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The XY problem in theory: An expert with broader knowledge
| than you realizes what you really should be asking.
|
| The XY problem in practice: Someone doesn't know the answer
| to your question so they randomly choose a response from the
| ten things they do know.
|
| Also: If we're calling it the "XY problem," does that make it
| mansplaining? (XY? Get it? Sorry.)
| shawnz wrote:
| If someone only has a tangential knowledge of the problem,
| would it be better if they just don't give their input at
| all and simply leave the thread empty? Non-experts
| contributing their opinion doesn't take away space from the
| experts to answer it properly.
|
| If the advice is really that bad or uninformed, then it
| should just be downvoted. That's not really related to the
| "XY problem".
| kasabali wrote:
| > Non-experts contributing their opinion doesn't take
| away space from the experts to answer it properly.
|
| Ever heard of a thing called signal to noise ratio?
| whatshisface wrote:
| On stack overflow, having several tangential non-answers
| will make the question look well-answered, potentially
| misdirecting the real expert away from it by creating a
| false impression.
| [deleted]
| Semiapies wrote:
| See also the questions that amount to "Why aren't you using the
| operating system/language/framework/library I'm actually
| familiar with, so I can answer you and get points?"
| at_a_remove wrote:
| That is one of the things that turned me off of Linux in the
| very early days ... every time I tried to find out how to do
| something, I was a big moron for not using someone else's
| distro.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _this isn 't one of those cases._
|
| Reading all of the replies and context around the solutions,
| you're right that it doesn't appear to be one of those cases.
| But I don't think it was that clear cut from the original
| question.
|
| The counter to this is, I believe, much much more common on SO:
| someone comes up with an odd solution to a problem in their
| head, tries to implement said solution, runs into challenges
| and comes to SO asking for help making their solution work.
| That then leads to over-engineered workarounds for hurdles they
| would not have encountered had they asked for help with their
| actual problem.
| xienze wrote:
| > people pick away at stuff that's orthogonal to the issue and
| won't resolve anything.
|
| Sometimes it's a case of "I don't know the answer to that, but
| I'd like to help. I'd like to know more about why you're doing
| that so I can perhaps suggest something that doesn't require
| doing that anymore." Which indeed may be very helpful because
| even if you knew the real answer to your problem, in many cases
| you'll need a workaround since the behavior probably won't be
| fixed anytime soon.
| adfm wrote:
| Gimme, gimme, gimme I need some more Gimme, gimme, gimme Don't
| ask what for --Black Flag
| bitwize wrote:
| This is why you don't put easter eggs in software.
| [deleted]
| Tepix wrote:
| What's "This"?
|
| That's not the learning here - the easter egg was merely moved,
| not removed.
| oefrha wrote:
| No, there was a bug fix at first (moving the offending code
| out of the man -w code path), then the whole thing was
| removed after deliberation.
|
| https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-
| db.git/commit/?id=b225...
| dnzkw wrote:
| God forbid you disturb the automatic tests of a company who's
| using your software without giving you anything in return.
| 1_player wrote:
| How do you know they aren't giving anything in return?
| scrollaway wrote:
| You'd know if they were. Thus if you don't, they aren't.
| ozkatz wrote:
| If they're paying for support or using RHEL (which
| employs many linux maintainers and contributors), how
| would I know?
| scrollaway wrote:
| Sounds like you wouldn't find out about their issue via a
| stackoverflow question then, but rather via the support
| channel they're paying for.
| detaro wrote:
| Especially for non-priority issues, community resources
| are often more effective than paid "support channels".
| scrollaway wrote:
| You're kinda answering your own question here aren't you?
| detaro wrote:
| No. Paying for/supporting open projects makes sense for
| lots of reasons, just "I get to submit tiny questions"
| isn't usually one of them.
| detaro wrote:
| You know the contributions of every Stack Overflow
| commenter and their employer? impressive, how do you do
| that?
| [deleted]
| scrollaway wrote:
| Okay, riddle me this: I work in a restaurant. I hand a
| bill to my customers. They leave without paying.
|
| But actually, how do I know they haven't paid? Maybe they
| gave the restaurant money ahead of time when I wasn't
| around, or they paid secretly behind my back...
|
| Or they just haven't paid their bill and i don't need to
| dig into it further. i ask them. If they paid, they'll
| let me know.
|
| If they have, I'll know. If I don't know, they likely
| haven't. If they have anyway, they'll tell me.
| detaro wrote:
| When I go ask questions on Stack Overflow I don't usually
| go "btw I work for XYZ, we are maintainers of A/B/C and
| contribute to D/E/F/G/H", no, because it's not relevant.
| Even though the maintainers of Linux tools very likely
| use at least one of A-H.
| scrollaway wrote:
| You're completely missing the point of my post(s).
|
| If you're contributing back to the software somehow,
| you'll have a more direct line to the developers. I've
| worked around, with and in open source nearly two
| decades, I've never seen this not be the case for anyone
| whose contributions weren't insignificant.
|
| If your issue is anything but trivial, you'll be going
| through channels where it is in fact obvious you have
| contributed back. Not stack overflow. For this issue it
| absolutely applies.
|
| If you can prove to me that the original poster/company
| has significantly contributed to the utility in question,
| I'll buy you a pizza. Your choice of toppings.
| detaro wrote:
| Okay, for the specific tool, sure. I tend to view this
| more as an ecosystem thing, and wouldn't consider someone
| who contributes elsewhere as someone scorn-worthy "not
| giving back" even if they haven't touched my specific
| small piece of software before. We started with
|
| > _God forbid you disturb the automatic tests of a
| company who 's using your software without giving you
| anything in return._
|
| By that measure the reaction to KDE CI asking about this
| man bug would be the same: "fuck them, what did they ever
| do for us". Fair?
|
| This of course would be different for the (all-to-common)
| example of someone barging in and making threats/demands,
| but that's not the case here. Someone asked a question,
| nothing more.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I get what you mean and i agree to some extent. With that
| said i think the general disdain is justified given that
| the absolute majority of people and companies do not in
| fact contribute back.
|
| Those who do shouldn't feel targeted by such statements
| imo.
| detaro wrote:
| Yes, I'm also very much talking about this specific case,
| where someone posted a factual question to a community
| channel. No demands, no "how dare you", no shouting, not
| even directly poking a maintainer. And I find the
| reactions jarring that just because they mentioned "our
| CI" suddenly they have to be bad guys. (Hoping that an
| end-user asking "my script unexpectedly failed" would not
| also get "what did users ever do for us" response)
| random_70398 wrote:
| It's the everlasting battle: "Having fun with Open Source"
| vs. "scrum certifications"
| op00to wrote:
| What does the automatic test EVEN DO?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| FOSS software wants to be taken seriously, until they have to
| deal with the real world, then it's all "hey man, what do you
| expect for free?".
| globular-toast wrote:
| I don't think software is capable of wanting anything. As a
| FOSS user the less "seriousness" the better. Life is just
| more fun with jokes. I love that I can build "sudo" with an
| option to have it insult me when I get my password wrong.
| Who wants to live a serious life?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Plenty of commercial software contain easter eggs as well.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I worked for a company where a developer put a dirty
| limerick in a UI control, activated by a keystone
| sequence.
|
| They also turned on output tracing via another keystroke
| sequence.
|
| During a presentation, one of the consultants needed to
| turn on tracing in front of a VERY large multinational
| client (heavens knows why, it was in front of C-suite
| execs...). They hit the wrong keystroke, and up popped
| the limerick - on a large projector, in front of the CEO.
|
| Don't put in Easter eggs.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm not saying putting easter eggs in is a good practice,
| only that it's not rare. I think with pretty much every
| company I've worked for, putting in easter eggs was
| specifically forbidden. And, in every company, they were
| put in anyway -- they just had to be sneaky enough to
| pass through code review undetected (which, I think,
| improved the quality of them!)
| missingrib wrote:
| What does this even mean?
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| It's a criticism of the way FOSS software advocates seem
| to want to eat their cake and have it too. They ask the
| world why they aren't using more FOSS software, which has
| all these benefits from being free and open, and when the
| world replies with a list of all the downsides of relying
| on software written by people hacking in their spare time
| --see: JWZ and the CADT model-- the advocates fall back
| on the defense that you can't complain because it is
| free.
|
| I know it sounds ridiculous, because free software is
| written by a diverse group of people with diverse goals,
| but this conversation happens all the time because its
| _advocates_ often try to represent it as a cohesive
| whole, that it very much isn 't, in pursuit of their own
| agenda.
| coldtea wrote:
| Lest some entitled company benefiting from Open Source without
| giving a cent back, and with no relations to the software devs,
| has a scare?
| detaro wrote:
| The projecting going on is impressive. Where is that
| _question_ "entitled"? How do you even _know_ it 's from a
| company, it's not like running CI is something only evil
| capitalists do, and what amount of open contributions said
| company does?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _How do you even know it 's from a company_
|
| Because that's where those "omg, there's something not
| absolutely sober and enterprisey, such as an easter egg"
| complaints come from...
| detaro wrote:
| Where do you see a "omg, there's something not absolutely
| sober and enterprisey, such as an easter egg" complaint?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Boo-urns.
|
| It's part of the culture, it isn't safety critical (or should
| NOT be) and the world is less colorful without them.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| If it's open source software I am giving away for free to the
| world, I am putting in whatever I want to.
|
| Feel free to fork.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Well the author decided to remove this joke, so feel free to
| add it back if its removal upsets you so much.
| smoldesu wrote:
| I don't even need to click the link and I'm laughing already.
| Stackexchange, don't ever change.
| lionkor wrote:
| > After some reflection, I've removed this Easter egg. It'll be
| gone in the upcoming man-db 2.8.0.
|
| Oh well, it was quite funny while it lasted. I like to imagine a
| person searching "man gimme gimme gimme after midnight" and
| being, for lack of a better word, rickrolled with that ABBA song.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| stderr instead of stdout is silly.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I thought about this recently, too, but it's "correct"
| behavior.
|
| Imagine you're running curl. Do you want it's progress in
| stdout when you're piping it? No. You want the output, and you
| shouldn't have to use --silent to get only that.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Gimme gimme gimme is the output. IMO the joke making it
| obviously different is better than the joke making it subtly
| different. Imagine how annoying it would be if it only had a
| 1 in 100 chance to happen, for instance.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Why? Stderr is meant to be a secondary "messy" output stream
| mainly for human consumption. The name is wrong. It should just
| be "output2". If the original poster on SO had correctly used
| stdout and ignored stderr, this would never have been a
| problem.
| oshiar53-0 wrote:
| On the contrary, printing the easter egg to stdout would have
| made it be recognized as part of the legitimate output. Here,
| "gimme gimme gimme" is not a valid manpath at all. This might
| have led to a even _more_ subtle issue that is _harder_ to
| debug, as the consumer tries to interpret gimme as a path to
| man pages.
| dwrowe wrote:
| If anything - they should add an additional test/assertion that
| they receive "gimme gimme gimme" half past midnight!
| Corun wrote:
| Turns out it's an easter egg referring to a song.
|
| Sadly while many people enjoyed it, others were annoyed by it.
| And the author has now removed it.
|
| I find it hard to relate with people who not only would be
| annoyed by something like this, but are annoyed about it enough
| to push their view on the internet to the point that the author
| feels the need to remove it.
|
| In my view, the best response to those people? Update it to a
| more recent, or perhaps a more recognisable reference. Perhaps
| "Rocket Man".
| st_goliath wrote:
| > Sadly while many people enjoyed it, others were annoyed by
| it. And the author has now removed it.
|
| One could also do like the nano developers did and add a
| straight forward configure flag to disable Easter eggs, which
| some distros then dutifully set for their nano packages.
| swayvil wrote:
| My bet is on Black Flag
|
| Gimme gimme gimme. Gimme some more. Gimme gimme gimme. Don't
| ask what for.
| bontaq wrote:
| It's not removed, read what they wrote:
|
| > This issue has been fixed with commit 84bde8: Running man
| with man -w will no longer trigger this easter egg.
|
| Running man with no arguments still triggers it. I also must
| have missed the part where someone "pushed their view".
| [deleted]
| dahfizz wrote:
| > It's not removed, read what they wrote:
|
| Yeah, this is what they wrote:
|
| >After some reflection, I've removed this Easter egg. It'll
| be gone in the upcoming man-db 2.8.0.
| arijun wrote:
| I think it was fixed and then subsequently removed:
|
| https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-
| db.git/commit/?id=84bd...
|
| https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-
| db.git/commit/?id=b225...
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| antihero wrote:
| Hell is for the humourless.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Humour, fun and games, and easter eggs are fine as long as they
| don't interfere with the actual functionality of an app or
| don't break other apps and workflows.
| rob74 wrote:
| Er...
|
| Elton John - "Rocket Man": released April 1972
|
| ABBA - "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!": released 1979
|
| So maybe it's more recognizable, but definitely not more
| recent.
|
| Aside from that, the joke of printing this phrase at 00:01 only
| works with the ABBA song, because it refers to a _man_ after
| _midnight_...
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Specifically, _" half past twelve"_.
| kawsper wrote:
| The full title:
|
| ABBA - Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
| iso1631 wrote:
| The lyrics are
|
| > Half past twelve [00:30] and I'm watching the late show
| in my flat all alone, how I hate to spend the evening on
| my own
|
| The chorus later continues
|
| > Gimme Gimme Gimme a man after midnight
| rob74 wrote:
| Ah, Ok, guess I'm only a half ABBA expert - unfortunately
| I can't edit my comment anymore to correct it...
| agumonkey wrote:
| `sudo dancingqueen`
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm half curious and half afraid of this being an actual
| thing. Do I try it or not? I feel like doing this on a
| remote VM spun up just to do it would be wasted with no
| speakers. Do I spin up a VM on my local machine? Or screw
| it, where's the fun in no risk?
| Delk wrote:
| I can't find any references to that kind of a string by
| running 'strings' on /usr/bin/sudo or the sudo libraries.
|
| Of course a more reasonable approach would be to grep the
| source code.
| op00to wrote:
| They actually opened a Red Hat support case to get the Easter
| egg removed.
| roenxi wrote:
| It isn't an Easter Egg, it is a defect with intent. Using a
| program at 0:30 isn't an unusual precondition and as seen here
| it will break stuff. Nondeterministic behaviour in a relatively
| common use case is bad. As seen here, predictably, it is
| breaking someone's test pipeline.
|
| If they want a cute reference every invocation, fine. If they
| want a cute reference in a bizarre edge case, well maybe. Still
| poor taste. I don't like to think what it will take, but sooner
| or later the people demanding that programs do what they are
| documented to do are going win the battle. They have technical
| correctness on their side.
|
| Good on the maintainer for being responsible.
| Corun wrote:
| If we are going for technical correctness... Anything being
| broken by this is relying on the output of man with no
| arguments which is not documented as far as I can see, other
| than that it should have exit code 0.
|
| Where is the boundary between responsible and harmless fun?
|
| Perhaps I should be careful not to edit this comment in case
| someone's test pipeline curls it and checks the content.
| cowsandmilk wrote:
| To be clear, he original stack exchange post was calling
| "man -w" which does have defined behavior. The maintainer
| of man fixed it at that point to only happen with the bare
| "man".
| op00to wrote:
| What use do you have for running the "man" command with no
| arguments?
| lucideer wrote:
| The person asking the Q wasn't annoyed by it as far as I can
| tell (just understandably confused).
|
| And the author's initial response was to leave the easter egg
| in, but to just fix the bug in it, since this behaviour was
| never intended (the intent was to trigger the easter egg on
| error condition, the bug was that it also triggered on manpath
| lookups).
|
| Later in the thread the author mentions they eventually removed
| it completely after "some reflection", but they don't really
| expand on their reasons.
|
| Were people annoyed? Was the author pressured? Was that the
| reason?
| dpwm wrote:
| I can think of a reason why I would take it out: it's an
| easter egg - i.e. unnecessary - that has already caused a
| problem once in a way that was not foreseen.
|
| Of course there may be some that have been using the existing
| behavior as a convenient way of telling if it is 00:30, but
| they have so far apparently remained silent.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Of course there may be some that have been using the
| existing behavior as a convenient way of telling if it is
| 00:30, but they have so far apparently remained silent.
|
| As xkcd says (https://xkcd.com/1172/), "every change breaks
| someone's workflow".
| jankotek wrote:
| Why should people care about some 50 year old obscure cultural
| references? It is not 1980ies, when 99% unix users were from
| western culture.
| tjpnz wrote:
| Because you might learn something new and learning is fun?
| FWIW I'm from a western country and didn't understand the
| reference.
| eru wrote:
| Maybe. But I prefer to keep my fun separate from my
| production software.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| You should demand a refund on your man SaaS subscription!
| Symbiote wrote:
| I spent an hour trying to work out what was wrong with a
| system. Files had timestamps from 1985, and I couldn't see
| where they were coming from.
|
| NPM turned out to be the source, with (this time) an American
| cultural reference: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/20439
|
| I would much prefer 1 January 1970, 1 January 2000, or some
| other date that is clearly a placeholder.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Oh come on, ABBA was probably the most global phenomenon ever
| coming out of Europe. Everybody is an ABBA fan, even if they
| haven't discovered it yet ;)
| rblatz wrote:
| I'm in my late 30s and have never understood the Abba
| obsession. I've heard some of their music and it doesn't
| really do it for me. And the weird way everyone acts about
| Abba, like you see in this thread, just reinforces that for
| me.
| blihp wrote:
| It's probably at least partly a 'you had to be there'
| situation to remember how popular, globally, that band
| was back in the 70's. The fact that they weren't from the
| US or UK made them stand out even more.
| overboard2 wrote:
| Presumably because the programmer likes that element of
| western culture. Are programmers supposed to conduct a poll
| among global stakeholders before they implement an easter
| egg?
| badsectoracula wrote:
| This reminds me some review or article i read many years
| ago about OS/2 2.0 (the one before Warp) that wrote
| something along the lines of IBM tried to use a color
| palette that would be appropriate for all cultures around
| the world and ended up making a user interface with colors
| that looked very bland for everyone :-P
| dubcanada wrote:
| Abba is European and extremely popular all over the world. It
| has nothing to do with "western culture".
| unwind wrote:
| Ouch, right in the nationalistic ego centre!
|
| Swedish, please.
| nefitty wrote:
| I like seeing reflections of creators' personalities in code.
| It's a little reminder to not take myself so seriously, to
| remember that these artificial systems called computers were
| totally created by humans and finally, that creativity in
| code is one of the human essences imbued in these systems.
|
| I wonder if AI's will create Easter eggs in their creations?
| Would they see them as a form of play, or only as a form of
| waste? What would that say about the eventual differences
| between a human and an artificial mind?
| account42 wrote:
| Sharing between cultures is a positive thing. And you don't
| have to care, it's just an easter egg after all - but let
| others onjoy it.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| I'm glad you found a way to twist this to relate to cancel
| culture.
| [deleted]
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/src/m...
| anm89 wrote:
| > what sort of test would break on parsing the output of man with
| no page specified?
|
| I'm honestly curious on this one
| oskingnix wrote:
| An infrastructure test that ensures man built and installed
| correctly.
| anm89 wrote:
| Who the heck tests every single one of their dependencies?
| Maybe like fighter jets or something I guess.
| effingwewt wrote:
| This question I take to the grave.
|
| I understand it derails the point of the exchange, but I cannot
| fathom how this could be a legitimate use case. I'm not saying
| it's _not_ , quite the opposite, I'm sure it was, but my
| curiosity has been piqued and for no reason whatsoever I _must_
| know.
|
| It reminds me of the Married with Children episode where AL has
| a piece of a chorus of a song he remembered and it drove him
| insane until he remembered. It was _hm hm himmmm_ and the song
| was I Will Follow Him, I believe.
|
| I felt that, I had read a book as a child and it fascinated me
| and started my lifelong obsession with books. I could remember
| parts of the book, but search engines sucked for many years. I
| don't remember when but at some point google crawl bot scraped
| the synopsis of the book-it was a Forgotten Realms book 'The
| Night Parade'. Incidentally it was very little like I had
| remembered but I still loved re-reading it.
|
| Anyway, hopefully that will happen with this question one day.
| I'll remember it, search it, and maybe find the answer.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| So what software should do something similar with "Wake Me Up
| When September"?
| lukeramsden wrote:
| I think printing "im awake" to stderr during the last minute of
| August might terrify a few people.
| eveningsteps wrote:
| `sleep` could be an appropriate candidate
| op00to wrote:
| Spoilsports.
| mjthompson wrote:
| man is not a safety nor mission critical system. It was trivial
| to work around functional anomalies. There was nothing wrong with
| this, and it was hilarious.
|
| I'm glad the VLC developers never backed down from the Santa hat
| popping up near Christmas, despite ridiculous criticism from a
| tiny minority of users.
|
| If you don't like it, fork it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| At what point does a software become mission critical? Would we
| be so accepting of this easter egg if it was in 'cat' or 'grep'
| rather than 'man'? I mean, yes, it's open source, so all
| downstream users can patch it out, but shouldn't unexpected
| output be considered a bug by the main upstream maintainer? How
| about an official branch, man-with-easter-eggs for users who
| want to debug this kind of fun at 00:30 in the morning.
| Delk wrote:
| I don't think 'man' is _that_ commonly used in scripts or as
| part of other automated processes that could go wrong. Most
| other unix utilities are fairly commonly used that way and a
| small behavioural change could be expected to break something
| somewhere just due to the sheer volume of use.
|
| I'm not actually _that_ surprised the easter egg broke
| something for someone even in 'man', for the exact same
| reason, but it's probably less expected than with grep and
| lots of other unix utilities.
| GrinningFool wrote:
| Conversely why does your determination that an open source
| project is 'mission critical' to your use case obligate the
| author to make any changes at all for you?
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't think the maintainer should be obligated to do
| anything. It would be _courteous_ to treat it as a bug and
| maybe even provide a patch so that downstream users can
| easily fix it, but not an obligation. It looks like this
| one is already fixed so the point is moot.
|
| If the primary maintainer of 'cat' decided it would be
| funny to have it output "meow" when run at 00:30 in the
| morning, it's totally their right to do it. I'd expect a
| lot of downstream users wouldn't find it that funny and
| would want to patch it out pretty quickly.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| The (or one of the) threads that feature how people are
| offended by a hat on a cone:
| https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=96539
| captainmuon wrote:
| I am offended that people didn't recognize that post as a
| joke. Or - alternatively - a ridiculous position that is
| tantamount to a joke.
|
| Seriously, while on the one hand I welcome that we have
| become more culturally sensitive, on the other hand in some
| situations we should just get a thicker skin and learn again
| to say 'nope'.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Yea I remember when it went down, being a lifelong user of
| VLC I was pretty active there. It seemed obvious to me it
| was a joke, but so many were sure it was not.
|
| Happened here the other day in a Perl thread. Someone made
| a pretty funny (to me) joke. Having used Perl too much I
| appreciated the joke but some read it differently.
|
| Like the tabs v spaces, Vim or Emacs, to me it seems funny
| and nothing to get riled over but some just become so
| invested in taking offense/personal.
| mjthompson wrote:
| You're right, one might invoke Poe's law in relation to
| complaints about a hat on a cone.
| rgoulter wrote:
| Similarly, VSCode faced the same issue:
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 which they
| then apologised for:
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440
|
| I wonder if the difference in response due to 8 years of
| shift in culture, or just different size of the maintainer?
| TchoBeer wrote:
| That first one is incredible. Getting offended on behalf of
| Jews for the millions of lives caused by... What,
| Christmas?
| cesarb wrote:
| It might be because Microsoft dislikes easter eggs in
| general, see https://web.archive.org/web/20171123041231/htt
| ps://blogs.msd... (followup to https://web.archive.org/web/
| 20171122154012/https://blogs.msd...).
| globular-toast wrote:
| The amount of effort exerted for that is insane.
| johan_felisaz wrote:
| I am surprised that they are serious when saying "even a
| single person being offended is one too many". Not want to
| start yet another flamewar on CoCs, but how is such a rule
| even practically enforced ? Given it's impossible to
| respect for a project of this scale with this many users,
| it just feels like a fake statement for good PR I feel like
| this makes the whole move even less respectful that if
| they'd have done nothing about the Santa hat complains
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah that makes no sense. Can I just say I'm offended
| about anything and they'll change it? Obviously not.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| The maintainer of VLC is French. We have a culture of
| parody and making fun of everything.
|
| This costs lives - people in France are killed because they
| made fun of the imaginary friend of some people. This is
| horrible and, unfortunately, we as a society start to give
| up. Teachers are told to be sensitive and not show pictures
| of gods, tomorrow this will be creationism and homeopathy
| and we will end up as another US.
|
| I get offended all the time, but people are free to express
| their minds without fear. Even if they are obviously wrong
| because they do not agree with me (whom in contrast is
| always right and they do not get it).
|
| Blackmail, master git branch, blacklists - all these
| changes are simply idiotic and the people who are proud of
| having changed that (and removing a hat on an IDE) probably
| do not realize that everyone officially tells them that we
| are proud of not offending them anymore, and when the
| micros are off they are called negros, twags and whatever
| word is painful to them. This is really sad.
|
| They are the first ones to lose here, by having invisible
| walls built around.
|
| I have a very good friend (a woman) who left a great
| company because she joined when the "diversity" program was
| live. She was told by her male colleagues that it used to
| be who you know, who you sleep with and now if you are a
| good match for diversity. She was brilliant but could not
| stand that and left for a smaller and more normal company.
|
| All these forced ratio and PC is really against the ones it
| tries to help or make comfortable or not offend. And to be
| clear - having been on the receiver side of such campaigns
| (a minority), it took some time to build trust wit the ones
| who were not part of the minority. I also felt how it is to
| be a mnority as a kid - and it was horrible.
|
| But PC is not the way to fix that.
|
| I used somewhere else the analogy of catholics in France.
| They are being made fun of, they react (or not) but it ends
| here. This is the reason why they are integrated to French
| culture, and protected by this culture. The village I live
| in has a yearly mass outside of the church. As a complete
| atheist I find this great because this is a tradition and I
| like to see the folklore (whihc is faith for the ones who
| attend the mass). OTOH catholics do not try anymore to
| actively get in your bed to check what you do there, or try
| to push some god into our school books. And we like them.
| [deleted]
| Bayart wrote:
| It's not just time span. VSCode is a Microsoft project, and
| there's probably quite a bit of US corporate culture around
| it.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| >If you don't like it, fork it.
|
| Go ahead.
|
| The question wasn't asking for it to be removed, this is wholly
| the author's decision. Can we not overreact?
| IshKebab wrote:
| > If you don't like it, fork it.
|
| The original request was ridiculous but in fairness the "if you
| don't like it, fork it" attitude is really bad too. Forking
| something isn't zero cost. You'd have to maintain it, and then
| try to get developers to come to your fork, teach users about
| your fork, and then you end up with the annoying ffmpeg/libav
| situation where you have two similar but different projects.
|
| It's kind of like saying "if you don't like Trump why don't you
| just leave?".
|
| A better and more honest response would have been "I have
| considered your idea and I unfortunately disagree and won't
| implement it."
| agumonkey wrote:
| Lets have mandatory forks before whine and enjoy the silence :)
| tonnyyhigh wrote:
| lol who did that?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Edit: Gotta say, I'm pretty proud that I got the joke by reading
| the comment title. I have a good friend who loves ABBA.
|
| https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/tree/src/man.c?...
|
| Looks like it's still there, but I don't know the intricacies of
| C. Does it print "gimme gimme gimme" at 00:30 just by invoking
| "man"?
| oshiar53-0 wrote:
| I personally find it weird to treat any output in stderr as an
| error condition. It is very common in Unix world to use stderr
| not only for error messages but also general mundane runtime logs
| and progress indicator messages. Moreover, programs usually
| define what it should output to _stdout_ , but not necessarily to
| _stderr_. After all, exit codes and `set -e` are a thing.
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