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.