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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Making it specific doesn't change anything

Of course it doesn't, when your "specific" analogy isn't nearly analogous to the situation.

I actually agree with him, it's a perfect analogy.

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.

Why does pizza taste metallic to me when I eat it on a boat?

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.

Analogies don’t have to be one-to-one. It’s close—and simple—enough to get the larger point across.

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.

> 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.

It's analogous because the existence of tests have absolutely nothing to do with the question at all.

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.