[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?