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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.sprintlink.net!cs.utexas.edu!venus.sun.com!news2me.EBay.Sun.COM!engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM!trantor!smarks From: smarks@trantor.Eng.Sun.COM (Stuart Marks) Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun.admin,comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc Subject: Re: You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish Date: 11 Aug 1995 18:34:44 GMT Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Lines: 54 Sender: smarks@trantor (Stuart Marks) Distribution: inet Message-ID: <40g7s4$eut@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> References: <405hjb$llr@news.jhu.edu> <4099s8$6ep@empire.texas.net> <40atpg$psj@nova.netapp.com> <40c5ul$jn8@light.twinsun.com> Reply-To: smarks@Eng.Sun.COM NNTP-Posting-Host: trantor.eng.sun.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.sys.sun.admin:51540 comp.unix.solaris:44060 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:647 In article <40c5ul$jn8@light.twinsun.com>, eggert@twinsun.com (Paul Eggert) writes: > I was told I'd see the `tune a fish' message back in the manual. > But did it reappear? Nooooo. And my Solaris 2.x hosts have been > hanging and crashing ever since. I'm sorry to say that the bug you filed has been closed with the disposition "will not fix". It was closed not too long after you filed it. > It's enough to make one switch to BSD/OS, which still has the joke. > > Don't laugh: the kind of humorless person who removes good-luck charms > from man pages is the kind of person who places higher priority on > bureaucratic correctness than on reliability, performance, and sound > engineering! I checked through the SCCS history for this file and the "tune a fish" line doesn't appear in any version. This particular version of the file appears to have originated with the SVR4 distribution from AT&T around 1990. Of course, it does appear in the SunOS 4.x source archives and in the BSD sources. I don't know whether it was deliberately removed or whether the version that was originally picked up by AT&T didn't have it. In any case, there is no indication that the "humorless person" to which you refer -- if such a person exists -- worked at Sun. Less clear to me is why the jokes weren't added back. I'd guess that there are enough problems to deal with that are more important than jokes in man pages. That's life in the big city. However, I am happy to report that Solaris 2.x has made some improvements on the shell joke front. There are some BSD-based shell jokes that stopped working in SunOS 4.x: % egrep SunOS /etc/motd SunOS Release 4.1.1 (GENERIC_SMALL) #1: Thu Oct 11 10:48:40 PDT 1990 % cat 'food in tin cans' cat: food in tin cans: No such file or directory Yet: % egrep SunOS /etc/motd Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.4 Generic July 1994 % cat 'food in tin cans' cat: cannot open food in tin cans Ah, the wheel of reinvention keeps turning. :-) s'marks -- Stuart W. Marks stuart.marks@eng.sun.com Common Desktop Environment 2550 Garcia Ave. M/S UMTV 21-122 SunSoft, Inc. Mountain View, CA 94043-1100