at a discussion about this issue i read a comment which i cant find right now but was very beautiful. It was saying that we should keep easter eggs like this, because in the end this is what differs us humans from machines.
Which is valid. But it's also valid that certain systems should work consistently and reliably. I mean in this case it seems mostly harmless, but in a hypothetical scenario a hacker needs to fix the production system of a hospital after a major disaster but needs to look up the docs for a command aaand... "gimme gimme gimme" shows up. No internet either.
I'm all for easter eggs (and haven't added one in forever, maybe unit test test strings), but they shouldn't interfere with regular operation. This particular one could've been updated to only trigger for a certain command, for example.
> in a hypothetical scenario a hacker needs to fix the production system of a hospital after a major disaster but needs to look up the docs for a command aaand... "gimme gimme gimme" shows up. No internet either.
I thought the easter egg only occurs when man is called without arguments.
>but in a hypothetical scenario a hacker needs to fix the production system of a hospital after a major disaster but needs to look up the docs for a command aaand... "gimme gimme gimme" shows up.
What obligation does a developer/maintainer have in this situation? If the hospital is using free/open source code, it's on them to understand how it works and how to fix it.
I'm all for easter eggs (and haven't added one in forever, maybe unit test test strings), but they shouldn't interfere with regular operation. This particular one could've been updated to only trigger for a certain command, for example.