Re:Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? (2017)
by SamBam on Thursday July 29, 2021 @12:00PM
(#27998008)
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.
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.