<story><title>Who controls glibc?</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/753646/a6ebb50040c5862c/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roenxi</author><text>Technical documentation isn&amp;#x27;t the place for a joke full stop. Documentation is for people who are typically busy, uncertain and potentially dealing with something that is going wrong.&lt;p&gt;They want clear, concise and accessible help. They don&amp;#x27;t want or need tasteless jokes. It is disrespectful to their time to include random garbage.&lt;p&gt;This is supposed to be read by people who need it, not people who know what is going on and want to enjoy a good laugh.</text></item><item><author>geofft</author><text>Nobody who removed the joke said they were offended by it, they just said that they didn&amp;#x27;t believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation. If anyone is offended, it is RMS, in the sense that he seems personally affronted that he doesn&amp;#x27;t carry the line-item veto power he thinks he had over all of GNU and people did not ask him before removing something he added 25 years ago.&lt;p&gt;Not everyone who disagrees with something is offended by the thing they disagree with. Shall I say that someone who prefers writing documentation in man pages instead of Markdown is offended by Markdown? Is Project Zero offended by buffer overflows?</text></item><item><author>bhhaskin</author><text>I agree with RMS on this. People need to grow up. It&amp;#x27;s ok to be offended, but not ok to try and correct everyone just because you are offended. A line needs to be drawn somewhere and this is harmless.</text></item><item><author>matthewbauer</author><text>So what annoys me about this discussion is that both sides are not being very honest. Calling it an &amp;quot;abortion joke&amp;quot; is to me highly misleading. It&amp;#x27;s an &amp;quot;abortion law joke&amp;quot; &amp;amp; has nothing to do with the procedure of abortion! The people arguing against it seem to be implying its much more inappropriate than it is.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, no where in the article is the actual &amp;quot;joke&amp;quot; mentioned. So I&amp;#x27;d like to include it here just so people can judge for themselves.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function.  We would be required to say that this is not an
acceptable way of terminating a program.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jonhendry18</author><text>&amp;quot;Technical documentation isn&amp;#x27;t the place for a joke full stop&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This is a bad take. When wading through dry technical documentation a little humor can make it much less laborious.&lt;p&gt;As long as the humor doesn&amp;#x27;t result in ambiguity, there&amp;#x27;s no problem.&lt;p&gt;Something like &amp;quot;You can tune a filesystem, but you can&amp;#x27;t tune a fish.&amp;quot; at the end of a manpage may elicit a chuckle but doesn&amp;#x27;t reduce understanding.</text></comment>
<story><title>Who controls glibc?</title><url>https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/753646/a6ebb50040c5862c/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>roenxi</author><text>Technical documentation isn&amp;#x27;t the place for a joke full stop. Documentation is for people who are typically busy, uncertain and potentially dealing with something that is going wrong.&lt;p&gt;They want clear, concise and accessible help. They don&amp;#x27;t want or need tasteless jokes. It is disrespectful to their time to include random garbage.&lt;p&gt;This is supposed to be read by people who need it, not people who know what is going on and want to enjoy a good laugh.</text></item><item><author>geofft</author><text>Nobody who removed the joke said they were offended by it, they just said that they didn&amp;#x27;t believe it was the sort of thing that belonged in technical documentation. If anyone is offended, it is RMS, in the sense that he seems personally affronted that he doesn&amp;#x27;t carry the line-item veto power he thinks he had over all of GNU and people did not ask him before removing something he added 25 years ago.&lt;p&gt;Not everyone who disagrees with something is offended by the thing they disagree with. Shall I say that someone who prefers writing documentation in man pages instead of Markdown is offended by Markdown? Is Project Zero offended by buffer overflows?</text></item><item><author>bhhaskin</author><text>I agree with RMS on this. People need to grow up. It&amp;#x27;s ok to be offended, but not ok to try and correct everyone just because you are offended. A line needs to be drawn somewhere and this is harmless.</text></item><item><author>matthewbauer</author><text>So what annoys me about this discussion is that both sides are not being very honest. Calling it an &amp;quot;abortion joke&amp;quot; is to me highly misleading. It&amp;#x27;s an &amp;quot;abortion law joke&amp;quot; &amp;amp; has nothing to do with the procedure of abortion! The people arguing against it seem to be implying its much more inappropriate than it is.&lt;p&gt;Anyway, no where in the article is the actual &amp;quot;joke&amp;quot; mentioned. So I&amp;#x27;d like to include it here just so people can judge for themselves.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function.  We would be required to say that this is not an
acceptable way of terminating a program.&amp;quot;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djsumdog</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not that hardcore about it, but I still agree this really shouldn&amp;#x27;t be in the official docs. Maybe in a tutorial or a set of slides.&lt;p&gt;I do agree with some professionalism in things that want to be taken seriously. I don&amp;#x27;t even really like the &amp;quot;Apt with super cow powers.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I do agree this isn&amp;#x27;t about political correctness. At one time GNU tools were just a bunch of devs trying to write open source tooling for fun or to learn. But with it being such a huge part of our industry  now, it does need to grow up.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re working on your own small open source projects, have fun with the docs and comments. But don&amp;#x27;t be like Stallman. Realize if your tools are really successful, those quips might get cut out one day. c&amp;#x27;est la vie</text></comment>