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Comment by thih9 | Hacker News Reader

Note that it’s no longer there.

> The developer of the man-db, Colin Watson, decided that there was enough fun and the story won't get forgotten and removed the easter egg completely.

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

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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.

Then fork it and maintain it yourself, that's the beauty.

this ain’t the movies bruv

I’m sure I’m a human and not a machine. I even enjoy art and humor. But I think Easter eggs are cringey and not funny in the vast majority of cases.

It’s just a difference in personality. Claiming that liking Easter eggs is the essence of humanity is a pretty extreme exaggeration.

>Claiming that liking Easter eggs is the essence of humanity is a pretty extreme exaggeration.

Claiming that the parent claimed that easter eggs are "the essence of humanity" is an extreme exaggeration.

Not surprising coming from someone trying to bully people out of doing something they like by calling it cringe though.

I'm not trying to bully anyone out of or into doing anything. Just expressing an opinion.

You need to report to lizard HQ to get your personality simulator recalibrated immediately. You are risking exposing all of us.

I just tried it on an old raspberry pi and it is there. (based on debian 9 stretch)

This can be your reason to update to a non-EOL system.

or the humorous reason not to bother. :)

(lol, this is not a mission critical, internet connected system)

Looks like you're fine with not getting updates, you get to enjoy the easter egg then.

You can't really expect that old of a version of Debian to be up to date

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