15 ms·

Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? (2017)

413 points by yankcrime 5y ago

Corun 5y ago
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".
- antihero 5y ago
  Hell is for the humourless.
- rob74 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Specifically, "half past twelve".
    - kawsper 5y ago
      The full title: ABBA - Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
      - iso1631 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        Ah, Ok, guess I'm only a half ABBA expert - unfortunately I can't edit my comment anymore to correct it...
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    `sudo dancingqueen`
    - dylan604 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
- lucideer 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      > 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/ https://xkcd.com/1172/), "every change breaks someone's workflow".
  - cjwatson44 5y ago
    I'm the author. Wow, this is suggesting a lot more drama than actually happened. I just decided that the joke (which after all was not exactly the height of sophisticated comedy) had had its day. I'm sure I could have dug my heels in and made a big thing of it, maybe freewheeling open source developer versus humourless corporate internet, and I imagine I'd have had people lining up as defenders and detractors and whatever, but the thing is ... if I'd done that, it wouldn't have been funny any more anyway, so why bother? For me, the point of an Easter egg in software is to make people who discover it smile without getting in their way: make a few people's days a little brighter. The nature of this one was that it wasn't all that likely that people would notice it - you had to run man without non-option arguments at the right time and you also had to know enough about ABBA for the output to remind you of the lyrics. For six years I heard barely a peep about it, and I'd pretty much forgotten about it myself, then suddenly it turns up on Stack Exchange and is all over the internet. Somebody on HN suggested that maybe this was the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm. The Register later had a comment thread on it full of ABBA puns. I'd only ruin it if I decided to be an arse about it; for a formerly-obscure silly bit of code, it isn't going to get any better than this anyway. Four years later, it still occasionally crops up and I get an ABBA earworm for the next day. I'm not sad about that!
- jankotek 5y ago
  Why should people care about some 50 year old obscure cultural references? It is not 1980ies, when 99% unix users were from western culture.
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    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?
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    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 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.
- bontaq 5y ago
  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".
  - arijun 5y ago
    I think it was fixed and then subsequently removed: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bde8d8a9a357bd372793d25746ac6b49480525 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd... https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=b225d9e76fbb0a6a4539c0992fba88c83f0bd37e https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=b225...
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  - dahfizz 5y ago
    > 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.
- roenxi 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
    What use do you have for running the “man” command with no arguments?
- dmitriid 5y ago
  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.
- thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
  I'm glad you found a way to twist this to relate to cancel culture.
- st_goliath 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
  My bet is on Black Flag Gimme gimme gimme. Gimme some more. Gimme gimme gimme. Don't ask what for.
- op00to 5y ago
  They actually opened a Red Hat support case to get the Easter egg removed.
bitwize 5y ago
This is why you don't put easter eggs in software.
- coldtea 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      >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 5y ago
        Where do you see a "omg, there's something not absolutely sober and enterprisey, such as an easter egg" complaint?
        coldtea 5y ago
        In the "This is why you don't put easter eggs in software" advice comment...
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- Tepix 5y ago
  What's "This"? That's not the learning here - the easter egg was merely moved, not removed.
lionkor 5y ago
> 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.
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mjthompson 5y ago
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.
- BrandoElFollito 5y ago
  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 https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=96539
  - rgoulter 5y ago
    Similarly, VSCode faced the same issue: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 which they then apologised for: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440 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?
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    - Bayart 5y ago
      It's not just time span. VSCode is a Microsoft project, and there's probably quite a bit of US corporate culture around it.
    - globular-toast 5y ago
      The amount of effort exerted for that is insane.
    - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
      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.
tonnyyhigh 5y ago
lol who did that?
smcl 5y ago
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.
- matsemann 5y ago
  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-xy-problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x...
  - skohan 5y ago
    I find this frustrating because I often want exactly
    - matsemann 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
tobyhinloopen 5y ago
https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/src/man.c?id=002a6339b1fe8f83f4808022a17e1aa379756d99 https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/src/m...
thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
stderr instead of stdout is silly.
- oshiar53-0 5y ago
  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.
- globular-toast 5y ago
  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.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
oshiar53-0 5y ago
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.
anm89 5y ago
> what sort of test would break on parsing the output of man with no page specified? I'm honestly curious on this one
- oskingnix 5y ago
  An infrastructure test that ensures man built and installed correctly.
  - anm89 5y ago
    Who the heck tests every single one of their dependencies? Maybe like fighter jets or something I guess.
- effingwewt 5y ago
  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.
op00to 5y ago
Spoilsports.
dwrowe 5y ago
If anything - they should add an additional test/assertion that they receive “gimme gimme gimme” half past midnight!
BurningFrog 5y ago
So what software should do something similar with "Wake Me Up When September"?
- eveningsteps 5y ago
  `sleep` could be an appropriate candidate
- lukeramsden 5y ago
  I think printing "im awake" to stderr during the last minute of August might terrify a few people.
adfm 5y ago
Gimme, gimme, gimme I need some more Gimme, gimme, gimme Don't ask what for —Black Flag
unethical_ban 5y ago
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?id=84bde8d8a9a357bd372793d25746ac6b49480525 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"?
smoldesu 5y ago
I don't even need to click the link and I'm laughing already. Stackexchange, don't ever change.

413 points by yankcrime 5y ago

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".

antihero 5y ago
Hell is for the humourless.
rob74 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Specifically, "half past twelve".
  - kawsper 5y ago
    The full title: ABBA - Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
    - iso1631 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        Ah, Ok, guess I'm only a half ABBA expert - unfortunately I can't edit my comment anymore to correct it...
- agumonkey 5y ago
  `sudo dancingqueen`
  - dylan604 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
lucideer 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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/ https://xkcd.com/1172/), "every change breaks someone's workflow".
- cjwatson44 5y ago
  I'm the author. Wow, this is suggesting a lot more drama than actually happened. I just decided that the joke (which after all was not exactly the height of sophisticated comedy) had had its day. I'm sure I could have dug my heels in and made a big thing of it, maybe freewheeling open source developer versus humourless corporate internet, and I imagine I'd have had people lining up as defenders and detractors and whatever, but the thing is ... if I'd done that, it wouldn't have been funny any more anyway, so why bother? For me, the point of an Easter egg in software is to make people who discover it smile without getting in their way: make a few people's days a little brighter. The nature of this one was that it wasn't all that likely that people would notice it - you had to run man without non-option arguments at the right time and you also had to know enough about ABBA for the output to remind you of the lyrics. For six years I heard barely a peep about it, and I'd pretty much forgotten about it myself, then suddenly it turns up on Stack Exchange and is all over the internet. Somebody on HN suggested that maybe this was the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm. The Register later had a comment thread on it full of ABBA puns. I'd only ruin it if I decided to be an arse about it; for a formerly-obscure silly bit of code, it isn't going to get any better than this anyway. Four years later, it still occasionally crops up and I get an ABBA earworm for the next day. I'm not sad about that!
jankotek 5y ago
Why should people care about some 50 year old obscure cultural references? It is not 1980ies, when 99% unix users were from western culture.
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
- nefitty 5y ago
  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?
- Symbiote 5y ago
  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 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.
bontaq 5y ago
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".
- arijun 5y ago
  I think it was fixed and then subsequently removed: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bde8d8a9a357bd372793d25746ac6b49480525 https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd... https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=b225d9e76fbb0a6a4539c0992fba88c83f0bd37e https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=b225...
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- dahfizz 5y ago
  > 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.
roenxi 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
  What use do you have for running the “man” command with no arguments?
dmitriid 5y ago
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.
thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
I'm glad you found a way to twist this to relate to cancel culture.
st_goliath 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
My bet is on Black Flag Gimme gimme gimme. Gimme some more. Gimme gimme gimme. Don't ask what for.
op00to 5y ago
They actually opened a Red Hat support case to get the Easter egg removed.

bitwize 5y ago

This is why you don't put easter eggs in software.

coldtea 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    >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 5y ago
      Where do you see a "omg, there's something not absolutely sober and enterprisey, such as an easter egg" complaint?
      - coldtea 5y ago
        In the "This is why you don't put easter eggs in software" advice comment...
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Tepix 5y ago
What's "This"? That's not the learning here - the easter egg was merely moved, not removed.

lionkor 5y ago

> 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.

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mjthompson 5y ago

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.

BrandoElFollito 5y ago
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 https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=96539
- rgoulter 5y ago
  Similarly, VSCode faced the same issue: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 which they then apologised for: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440 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?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Bayart 5y ago
    It's not just time span. VSCode is a Microsoft project, and there's probably quite a bit of US corporate culture around it.
  - globular-toast 5y ago
    The amount of effort exerted for that is insane.
  - BrandoElFollito 5y ago
    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.

tonnyyhigh 5y ago

lol who did that?

smcl 5y ago

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.

matsemann 5y ago
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-xy-problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-x...
- skohan 5y ago
  I find this frustrating because I often want exactly
  - matsemann 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.

tobyhinloopen 5y ago

https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/src/man.c?id=002a6339b1fe8f83f4808022a17e1aa379756d99 https://git.savannah.nongnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/src/m...

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago

stderr instead of stdout is silly.

oshiar53-0 5y ago
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.
globular-toast 5y ago
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.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.

oshiar53-0 5y ago

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.

anm89 5y ago

> what sort of test would break on parsing the output of man with no page specified? I'm honestly curious on this one

oskingnix 5y ago
An infrastructure test that ensures man built and installed correctly.
- anm89 5y ago
  Who the heck tests every single one of their dependencies? Maybe like fighter jets or something I guess.
effingwewt 5y ago
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.

op00to 5y ago

Spoilsports.

dwrowe 5y ago

If anything - they should add an additional test/assertion that they receive “gimme gimme gimme” half past midnight!

BurningFrog 5y ago

So what software should do something similar with "Wake Me Up When September"?

eveningsteps 5y ago
`sleep` could be an appropriate candidate
lukeramsden 5y ago
I think printing "im awake" to stderr during the last minute of August might terrify a few people.

adfm 5y ago

Gimme, gimme, gimme I need some more Gimme, gimme, gimme Don't ask what for —Black Flag

unethical_ban 5y ago

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?id=84bde8d8a9a357bd372793d25746ac6b49480525 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"?

smoldesu 5y ago

I don't even need to click the link and I'm laughing already. Stackexchange, don't ever change.