6 ms·
Sad. I think more people smiled and had their day improved by encountering this bug than people who had their day ruined by debugging this.
by arjvik 2y ago
Sad. I think more people smiled and had their day improved by encountering this bug than people who had their day ruined by debugging this.
- snvzz 2y agoThere are people who abhor surprises. I am one of them.
- ryandrake 2y agoNot sad to me. A program is expected to behave sensibly for all of its inputs, reliably producing its outputs. Larger systems depend on their sub components working properly. Imagine if grep had an Easter egg where it randomly output a joke 1 out of every 1,000,000 runs. How would you debug that deep in a bash script somewhere, as was the case for OP. If you absolutely must write an Easter egg, put it in the “About” screen or the command line usage string or something… not in the program’s primary output.
- _V_ 2y agoExpecting software to "behave sensibly" is your own faulty assumption. I write software and I've learned never to expect such thing in an environment, that almost anything can bug out, even including the CPU itself.
- strogonoff 2y agoA real-world program (a product of fallible humans, made for fallible humans, executing on hardware built by fallible humans and operating in unpredictable environment) is never bug-free or 100% reliable. There is always a chance that it will fail to behave sensibly—expecting otherwise is foolish and poor design. That holds with or without easter eggs. Easter eggs is an element of controlled chaos.
- ryandrake 2y agoYea I don’t want to deal with some joker’s controlled chaos at 10:30PM before launch day trying to isolate a rare-repro bug that turns out was deliberately added. If that makes me a Grumpy Graybeard then I accept that name. I wouldn’t want my home builder to insert an Easter egg that causes my windows to open randomly in the middle of the night on one day of the year because he found it “joyful.”
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- idunnoman1222 2y agoeggs in the manual buddy. It’s like a joke while you’re reading really dry documentation.
- strogonoff 2y agoIf output of man invoked without any arguments causes a critical bug right before the launch day, or the equivalent of your windows opening randomly in the middle of the night, you have much bigger things to worry about than that easter egg. (I doubt a true Graybeard would ever find oneself in such a circumstance.) If bit flips become more common as transistors get smaller, that’s certainly going to throw a much less controlled wrench in the works.
- Ekaros 2y agoIt might not be critical bug. But it certainly could be failed build job. Which you then have to rerun wasting time or manually hunt down and waste time tracking where it comes from. And something like this printing out in error could indicate that you have been compromised and you should lock down everything. Verify that you full system is clean and go through all of the logs.
- strogonoff 2y agoThis ad-hoc approach looks very suboptimal as a threat detection heuristic. Judging about your system’s security by whether there are binaries that behave in upredictable ways means a game of whack-a-mole against buggy programs (which is 100% of them, remember?), while letting real threats go by. A way of making sure your binaries are trusted is supply chain security, which starts with not obtaining them through unvetted sources. If in that situation a known-trusted man says a funny joke at midnight, your spidey senses would not be triggered. In other words, if there is a way for suspect binaries to get into your system, you have a bigger problem. If there is no such way, you can be sure it’s benign behaviour, a bug in the program, an Easter egg, or even a bit flip or some unlikely interaction of factors. If you are not sure whether you have eliminated all such ways, sure, it might seem like a cause for worry—however, I don’t think attackers you should really worry about would try to make themselves noticed through jokes with Western cultural references (or through any jokes for that matter, or in any way at all).
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- hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago[flagged]
- wpietri 2y agoSaying that it "is expected" is a rhetorical trick, projecting your personal notions onto the structure of the universe. You may expect that, but I don't. To me, software is a community effort. Communities are made of people, and people have gloriously many motivations for their work. A spirit of play is one of those motivations, and I'm glad people honor it. Yes, it shouldn't cause much trouble along the way. But that's not because of some theory about what software it's for. It's because of the people.
- snvzz 2y agoTry reading man(1) i.e. doing man man sometime. The expected behavior is described there.
- seanhunter 2y agoOh please. 'man' is fundamentally different to 'grep' and if you can't see how you shouldn't be producing systems of any kind. For starters the user of 'man' is an interactive unix user. Other than really unusual edge cases (eg processes which produce printed versions of the unix manual, and the test scripts of the OP in the stackexchange) there are no non-interactive or batch uses of man, it isn't used in pipelines or scripts etc. Whereas grep is a staple of batch processes, scripts, cronjobs large and small as well as being a key tool for interactive use.
- cperciva 2y agoThe Tarsnap website has the man pages for tarsnap utilities, for easy googling; they're generated basically by `man | sed`. I would be very annoyed if the Tarsnap website was broken because someone decided to throw in an Easter egg and make the output occasionally inconsistent. If anyone reading this is ever considering putting in an Easter egg like this: Please check if stdout is a terminal! If your output is going to a terminal, it's probably safe to be silly. If your output is going anywhere else, you should absolutely not play games.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- seanhunter 2y agoChecking that stdout is a terminal is a good idea indeed.
- mistercheph 2y agoAdmit it, you’re very annoyed even when Tarsnap does work, this is more of a question of character.
- asimpleusecase 2y agoSo is AI an Eater egg machine?
- hi-v-rocknroll 2y agoEaster eggs are joie de vivre character against the tyranny of mediocre, boring doldrums and people who suck the life and joy out of everything cool and interesting, or can't grok art.
- amiga386 2y agoI agree. Also, Debian agrees, this is one of their most fundamental and important tools: $ apt | tail -1 This APT has Super Cow Powers. $ apt moo (__) (oo) /------\/ / | || * /\---/\ ~~ ~~ ..."Have you mooed today?"... Also, aptitude: $ aptitude --help | tail -1 This aptitude does not have Super Cow Powers. $ aptitude moo There are no Easter Eggs in this program. $ aptitude -v moo There really are no Easter Eggs in this program. $ aptitude -vv moo Didn't I already tell you that there are no Easter Eggs in this program? $ aptitude -vvv moo Stop it! $ aptitude -vvvv moo Okay, okay, if I give you an Easter Egg, will you go away? $ aptitude -vvvvv moo All right, you win. /----\ -------/ \ / \ / | -----------------/ --------\ ---------------------------------------------- $ aptitude -vvvvvv moo What is it? It's an elephant being eaten by a snake, of course.
- lukan 2y agoWould you still think it is art, if you would have been the one to stay up late at night, fixing some mysterious bug, that turned out to be a joke?