[Corun]

Turns out it's an easter egg referring to a song.

Sadly while many people enjoyed it, others were annoyed by it. And the author has now removed it.

I find it hard to relate with people who not only would be annoyed by something like this, but are annoyed about it enough to push their view on the internet to the point that the author feels the need to remove it.

In my view, the best response to those people? Update it to a more recent, or perhaps a more recognisable reference. Perhaps "Rocket Man".

[lucideer]

The person asking the Q wasn't annoyed by it as far as I can tell (just understandably confused).

And the author's initial response was to leave the easter egg in, but to just fix the bug in it, since this behaviour was never intended (the intent was to trigger the easter egg on error condition, the bug was that it also triggered on manpath lookups).

Later in the thread the author mentions they eventually removed it completely after "some reflection", but they don't really expand on their reasons.

Were people annoyed? Was the author pressured? Was that the reason?

[cjwatson44]

I'm the author. Wow, this is suggesting a lot more drama than actually happened. I just decided that the joke (which after all was not exactly the height of sophisticated comedy) had had its day. I'm sure I could have dug my heels in and made a big thing of it, maybe freewheeling open source developer versus humourless corporate internet, and I imagine I'd have had people lining up as defenders and detractors and whatever, but the thing is ... if I'd done that, it wouldn't have been funny any more anyway, so why bother?

For me, the point of an Easter egg in software is to make people who discover it smile without getting in their way: make a few people's days a little brighter. The nature of this one was that it wasn't all that likely that people would notice it - you had to run man without non-option arguments at the right time and you also had to know enough about ABBA for the output to remind you of the lyrics. For six years I heard barely a peep about it, and I'd pretty much forgotten about it myself, then suddenly it turns up on Stack Exchange and is all over the internet. Somebody on HN suggested that maybe this was the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm. The Register later had a comment thread on it full of ABBA puns. I'd only ruin it if I decided to be an arse about it; for a formerly-obscure silly bit of code, it isn't going to get any better than this anyway.

Four years later, it still occasionally crops up and I get an ABBA earworm for the next day. I'm not sad about that!

[dpwm]

I can think of a reason why I would take it out: it’s an easter egg – i.e. unnecessary – that has already caused a problem once in a way that was not foreseen.

Of course there may be some that have been using the existing behavior as a convenient way of telling if it is 00:30, but they have so far apparently remained silent.

[cesarb]

> Of course there may be some that have been using the existing behavior as a convenient way of telling if it is 00:30, but they have so far apparently remained silent.

As xkcd says (https://xkcd.com/1172/), "every change breaks someone's workflow".

[rob74]

Er...

Elton John - "Rocket Man": released April 1972

ABBA - "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!": released 1979

So maybe it's more recognizable, but definitely not more recent.

Aside from that, the joke of printing this phrase at 00:01 only works with the ABBA song, because it refers to a man after midnight...

[MauranKilom]

Specifically, "half past twelve".

[kawsper]

The full title:

ABBA - Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)

[iso1631]

The lyrics are

> Half past twelve [00:30] and I'm watching the late show in my flat all alone, how I hate to spend the evening on my own

The chorus later continues

> Gimme Gimme Gimme a man after midnight

[rob74]

Ah, Ok, guess I'm only a half ABBA expert - unfortunately I can't edit my comment anymore to correct it...

[agumonkey]

`sudo dancingqueen`

[dylan604]

I'm half curious and half afraid of this being an actual thing. Do I try it or not? I feel like doing this on a remote VM spun up just to do it would be wasted with no speakers. Do I spin up a VM on my local machine? Or screw it, where's the fun in no risk?

[Delk]

I can't find any references to that kind of a string by running 'strings' on /usr/bin/sudo or the sudo libraries.

Of course a more reasonable approach would be to grep the source code.

[antihero]

Hell is for the humourless.

[bontaq]

It's not removed, read what they wrote:

> This issue has been fixed with commit 84bde8: Running man with man -w will no longer trigger this easter egg.

Running man with no arguments still triggers it. I also must have missed the part where someone "pushed their view".

[arijun]

I think it was fixed and then subsequently removed:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=84bd...

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/man-db.git/commit/?id=b225...

[dahfizz]

> It's not removed, read what they wrote:

Yeah, this is what they wrote:

>After some reflection, I've removed this Easter egg. It'll be gone in the upcoming man-db 2.8.0.

[op00to]

They actually opened a Red Hat support case to get the Easter egg removed.

[st_goliath]

> Sadly while many people enjoyed it, others were annoyed by it. And the author has now removed it.

One could also do like the nano developers did and add a straight forward configure flag to disable Easter eggs, which some distros then dutifully set for their nano packages.

[thrwyoilarticle]

I'm glad you found a way to twist this to relate to cancel culture.

[swayvil]

My bet is on Black Flag

Gimme gimme gimme. Gimme some more. Gimme gimme gimme. Don't ask what for.

[dmitriid]

Humour, fun and games, and easter eggs are fine as long as they don't interfere with the actual functionality of an app or don't break other apps and workflows.

[roenxi]

It isn't an Easter Egg, it is a defect with intent. Using a program at 0:30 isn't an unusual precondition and as seen here it will break stuff. Nondeterministic behaviour in a relatively common use case is bad. As seen here, predictably, it is breaking someone's test pipeline.

If they want a cute reference every invocation, fine. If they want a cute reference in a bizarre edge case, well maybe. Still poor taste. I don't like to think what it will take, but sooner or later the people demanding that programs do what they are documented to do are going win the battle. They have technical correctness on their side.

Good on the maintainer for being responsible.

[Corun]

If we are going for technical correctness... Anything being broken by this is relying on the output of man with no arguments which is not documented as far as I can see, other than that it should have exit code 0.

Where is the boundary between responsible and harmless fun?

Perhaps I should be careful not to edit this comment in case someone's test pipeline curls it and checks the content.

[cowsandmilk]

To be clear, he original stack exchange post was calling “man -w” which does have defined behavior. The maintainer of man fixed it at that point to only happen with the bare “man”.

[op00to]

What use do you have for running the “man” command with no arguments?

[jankotek]

Why should people care about some 50 year old obscure cultural references? It is not 1980ies, when 99% unix users were from western culture.

[Symbiote]

I spent an hour trying to work out what was wrong with a system. Files had timestamps from 1985, and I couldn't see where they were coming from.

NPM turned out to be the source, with (this time) an American cultural reference: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/20439

I would much prefer 1 January 1970, 1 January 2000, or some other date that is clearly a placeholder.

[account42]

Sharing between cultures is a positive thing. And you don't have to care, it's just an easter egg after all - but let others onjoy it.

[overboard2]

Presumably because the programmer likes that element of western culture. Are programmers supposed to conduct a poll among global stakeholders before they implement an easter egg?

[badsectoracula]

This reminds me some review or article i read many years ago about OS/2 2.0 (the one before Warp) that wrote something along the lines of IBM tried to use a color palette that would be appropriate for all cultures around the world and ended up making a user interface with colors that looked very bland for everyone :-P

[flohofwoe]

Oh come on, ABBA was probably the most global phenomenon ever coming out of Europe. Everybody is an ABBA fan, even if they haven't discovered it yet ;)

[rblatz]

I’m in my late 30s and have never understood the Abba obsession. I’ve heard some of their music and it doesn’t really do it for me. And the weird way everyone acts about Abba, like you see in this thread, just reinforces that for me.

[blihp]

It's probably at least partly a 'you had to be there' situation to remember how popular, globally, that band was back in the 70's. The fact that they weren't from the US or UK made them stand out even more.

[tjpnz]

Because you might learn something new and learning is fun? FWIW I'm from a western country and didn't understand the reference.

[eru]

Maybe. But I prefer to keep my fun separate from my production software.

[Doctor_Fegg]

You should demand a refund on your man SaaS subscription!

[nefitty]

I like seeing reflections of creators’ personalities in code. It’s a little reminder to not take myself so seriously, to remember that these artificial systems called computers were totally created by humans and finally, that creativity in code is one of the human essences imbued in these systems.

I wonder if AI’s will create Easter eggs in their creations? Would they see them as a form of play, or only as a form of waste? What would that say about the eventual differences between a human and an artificial mind?

[dubcanada]

Abba is European and extremely popular all over the world. It has nothing to do with "western culture".

[unwind]

Ouch, right in the nationalistic ego centre!

Swedish, please.