Personally, I really appreciate that a little whimsy was added into a terminal command that's literally built for reading manuals for command-line programs. IMO, this was a net-positive for humanity.
[1]: https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd...
Maybe if you took a step back, you wouldn't feel so irritated. You could be stuck working on an AS400.
As I said, not that I think it matters. But "no one pays for open source" frequently just isn't correct these days.
I understand it's paid for one way or the other, but to use it, it is free. I'm comparing it to before, if you wanted to try a Microsoft product or something, you had to buy it and once you broke the seal, you owned it* (or the little plastic disk and box).
Also, if the OP was a maintainer, I can see where he would get frustrated. I assume he was just some overzealous user.
Anyway, the fact that open source even exists is probably the best thing to happen to computing since it's invention (and I'm not even much of an open source user).
*No refunds.
I remember the days of batch creating UPC barcodes on an AS400
People need to realize this isn't some mission-critical tool, this is a manual reader.
Technically the behavior is standard, for some definition of standard.
The output of man is repeatable, and you may depend on that.
Regardless of TZ, dom, dow, etc -- if it's 00:30 local you get this (additional) output. If it's not, you don't.
Also, it's debatable whether `man -w` without further arguments is standard usage, since it's clearly an incomplete command (that should return nonzero, but that's another story).
There's humor all over every technical discipline. Lighten up.
The question isn't believable. Your position is hardly believable.
Scripting however I take very seriously.
Unless you're someone who write that kind of embedded software, and depends on the stderr output of man to control some critical parts of that system (which would be insane) your level of pedantry is unwarranted.
Man is an UI for people. Complaining about its output is like complaining about the GUI of a PDF reader. Sure, you could take snapshots of it, parse it in your system, and be slightly annoyed once by a small easter egg, but it would be kind of stupid because that's not what it was build for.
> Man is an UI for people.
Even the man page includes a couple of examples where it isn't.
Honestly, the fact that this got into the codebase makes me question the code review process of GNU and what else is potentially hiding in there.