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Comment by juangacovas | Hacker News Reader

A pretty amount of tools still use Perl under the hood and I'm pretty sure some of the "granted, they just work" tools that we're used to be just there or install, use Perl in some way.

Two examples I can give in my case are the good old rsnapshot, and CSF firewall

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GNU Parallel is also a very useful tool, and it's written in Perl 5.

A useful tool with a highly annoying message to the user if you're using Fedora.

That's odd, but interesting. What warning?

Is it Fedora-specific?

It's specific to the tool, but most distros disable the message.

> If you want GNU Parallel to be maintained in the future, and not just wither away like so many other free software tools, you need to help finance the development.

etc

For more details, check out the Arch Linux patches that patch this super-annoying message out:

https://git.archlinux.org/svntogit/community.git/tree/trunk?...

The message appears every time when using GNU parallel unless a very long flag is given or the executable has been patched.

I think it goes against the philosophy of most open source software that comes with Linux distros, where you are given software freely, but pay back by contributing to the overall open source community, if you can and want. (This is my subjective interpretation of the matter).

I see. I mostly use Debian, and it seems that their "parallel" package removed the notice.

More info at: https://sources.debian.org/patches/parallel/20161222-1.1/

Was that the tool requesting to be cited if it was used anywhere near a publication?

I wanted to use it but also wanted to respect the wishes of the author, so, as I disagreed with the note, had to use something else.

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