Re:Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30?
by uolo on Tuesday November 21, 2017 @01:17PM
(#15750192)
I don't think it is that irritating as such. But it's the principle. It much easier to convince people that they should be prudent than at which moments jokes are appropriate. I recently found out that some mplayer developer thought it was funny to include "Core dumped ;)" as the last line when you dump a stream. I'm sure that it was funny to them, but less so when you are just trying to figure out if it works after battling deceptive copyright protection, and learning all the settings of different tools, for a couple of hours. Now try and convince the developers that this, or other jokes, isn't funny.
> Man is an UI for people.
Even the man page includes a couple of examples where it isn't.
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.