Easter eggs are joie de vivre character against the tyranny of mediocre, boring doldrums and people who suck the life and joy out of everything cool and interesting, or can't grok art.
$ apt | tail -1
This APT has Super Cow Powers.
$ apt moo
(__)
(oo)
/------\/
/ | ||
* /\---/\
~~ ~~
..."Have you mooed today?"...
$ aptitude --help | tail -1
This aptitude does not have Super Cow Powers.
$ aptitude moo
There are no Easter Eggs in this program.
$ aptitude -v moo
There really are no Easter Eggs in this program.
$ aptitude -vv moo
Didn't I already tell you that there are no Easter Eggs in this program?
$ aptitude -vvv moo
Stop it!
$ aptitude -vvvv moo
Okay, okay, if I give you an Easter Egg, will you go away?
$ aptitude -vvvvv moo
All right, you win.
/----\
-------/ \
/ \
/ |
-----------------/ --------\
----------------------------------------------
$ aptitude -vvvvvv moo
What is it? It's an elephant being eaten by a snake, of course.You can spray paint railway infrastructure - you still will be chased out and even might get shot at.
If you do the same on random wall in the park you might at worst be scolded by someone and be chased out by police but most likely not shot at.
Basic OS tools like man are more like railway infrastructure. So for me Easter eggs belong in games or something like restaurant web site or online forum like hn.
By that logic, the maintainers of man, who hold the copyright, and merely license it to you, have the same right.
Don't like it? They were generous enough to release it under terms where you can compile a fork without the joke in it.
Apparently they decided that being harassed by humorless scolds was more hassle than just removing the joke. Many such cases.
But it also sucks. Steamrolling all the whimsy out of FOSS sucks. Everyone who takes umbrage at whimsy and easter eggs, hassling maintainers about it, is a thief of joy.
It is also the same on HN if you make “witty comment” you are going to be sent back to Reddit so is HN community thief of joy and bunch of dolldrums?
I guess not - but also not every easter egg is art and most are not and one we are discussing is pretty much “go on Reddit with that” level of art.
The last thing you usually suspect, is that the system call is wrong. So you spend a lot of time investigating everything else. I like a good prank - they usually work by the prankster being around and ready to step in, if the joke goes too far. Not what happens, if you deploy the prank worldwide. There are worse things for sure, but still this is not something I can applaud. I wasted too much time on other useless shit. so I would likely not be amused having my time wasted some more by someone thinking he is funny.
And truthfully, a consistent repeatable bug, in software intended for human consumption (man in shell scripts would be at least a little weird, like vim in shell scripts) is not so bad really.
And midnight isnt so late, I have a heritage of systems administration, all kinds of things happen at 3-4am; its a good feeling to debug and prevent them.
How could they find joy with such a joke?