“grep -R doesn't automatically search amazon”

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/1055766

by shrikant • 14 years ago

325 84 14 years ago

bugs.launchpad.net

bnr• 14 years ago

Great to see Shuttleworth taking it easy...

> grep --universe might be a better shortcut ;)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bu...

engtech• 14 years ago

I find "grep --universe" confusing because that should be a shortcut for searching Amazon for Carl Sagan cooking books.

   http://www.neatorama.com/2009/12/31/carl-sagans-apple-pie-recipe/

famousactress• 14 years ago

My favorite bit appears in the comment chain:

>akeane, please stop with the snark.

Why is my bug report a "snark", I have in good faith reported what I consider a bug with Ubuntu, namely the functionality that is being added to the GUI is not also being consistently added to the CLI tools that some many of us rely on.

You have chosen to mark my bug report "invalid", which is your total prerogative and I have total respect for you doing that.

I am saddened, however, you have chosen to resort to personal insults (being labeled a snark nearly made my monocle drop out!), rather than focusing on the technical issues presented.

TallboyOne• 14 years ago

I lost it at the monocle bit.

blahedo• 14 years ago

And this, from further down:

grep --universe would be a good shortcut, except that i think we all agree this important functionality should be present by default. showing these results from places other than my local computer should be opt-out! how about grep --no-universe ?

jbermudes• 14 years ago

It amazes me how easily this whole thing could have been prevented if they had just made the Amazon results show up in a separate shopping lens instead of the default lens.

Then even if it's pre-installed there'd be some reasonable expectation that a program designed to show you shopping selections would have to connect to a 3rd party server and send your query.

cooldeal• 14 years ago

What amazes me is that people make it sound as if they did not consider this. Of course what they considered doing that but also realized that it will raise very little revenue since 99.99% of folks will not click on the Shopping lens.

With this way, people are forced to see Amazon results and a few of them clicking on irrelevant results and buying will result in a lot more revenue comparatively given that it's certainly an affiliate deal.

yobbobandana• 14 years ago

Until everyone stops using Ubuntu because for some mysterious reason they suddenly hate it.

krichman• 14 years ago

It's just a total misfire to take Linux users, many of whom are in the Venn diagram intersection of "computer savvy" and "libre software advocate", and then try to force them to watch advertisements on their own desktop.

Even people that don't know computers would probably prefer to use Windows or OS X, since that's going to be a nicer experience.

s_henry_paulson• 14 years ago

Literally no-one would opt-in.

The obvious solution that was missed is 2 versions.

You have a paid version with no Amazon integration, and a free version with Amazon enabled by default.

This works 3 ways:

(1) The people who don't want amazon, but don't want to pay can just modify the free version. No big deal, small amount of effort to get ads out of your free software.

(2) Lots of people end up paying for the software, not because they don't want to be bothered modifying the free version, but because they actually want to support the product.

(3) They still get tons of revenue from all of the people that download the free version, but never turn the Amazon off.

Almost nobody complains, and everyone wins.

The solution that they chose is probably the worst possible option, and has put the entire operating system's future at risk.

menacingly• 14 years ago

The decision to include Amazon results (by default!) is not in itself a terrible move, but it is an incorrect one.

The fact that it is so patently incorrect to so many outside observers forces me to consider whether the internal vision of the project is completely distorted. No, it's not a big deal, it's just a silly & inappropriate use of your time, and potentially a symptom of a distressing detachment from the real.

mkup• 14 years ago

New kind of trolls detected in the wild: bugtracker trolls.

BasDirks• 14 years ago

not so new; happened a few times on github (hello ruby community).

k3n3• 14 years ago

I still consider Github "new".

DannyBee• 14 years ago

Bugtracker trolls have been around a while.

When we started using bugzilla for GCC (many years ago now), within the first 100 bug reports, i think there were 5 trolls.

This also isn't very advanced trolling. Advanced trolling is indistinguishable from the thing they were trying to parody.

juan_juarez• 14 years ago

Ubuntu bug #1 did sort of set a precedent...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu//+bug/1

spartango• 14 years ago

While this is amusing, it's also rather disrespectful.

You may not agree with the decision by the Ubuntu team to incorporate a feature...and that's fine. There are plenty of ways to voice that opinion (blogs, email, forum).

Putting patently invalid(joke) bug reports in a system that's designed for actionable bug fixes just makes life a bit more troublesome for people actually trying to fix things. Harassing them about it through this channel seems like a waste of their time.

Seems like Shuttleworth responded to this gracefully, though. :)

eckyptang• 14 years ago

It's akin to a sit in protest. I think it's adequately placed.

kstenerud• 14 years ago

And adequately impotent. When you insult someone, they stop listening to you.

marshray• 14 years ago

A sit-in-protest has some properties of a physical DoS (denial of service). This was mere words, and no great quantity of them.

This to me looked more like a good old fashioned cleverly-constructed reductio ad absurdum argument and Launchpad seems an entirely appropriate forum for such feedback.

chao-• 14 years ago

>Putting patently invalid(joke) bug reports in a system that's designed for actionable bug fixes just makes life a bit more troublesome for people actually trying to fix things. Harassing them about it through this channel seems like a waste of their time.

Let's consider protest via sit-ins at Local Business Foo for its socially-irresponsible but entirely-legal policy/action of Bar. There are plenty of places to protest those actions/policies. Various municipal bodies (city council, chamber of commerce) and private bodies (better business bureau, etc.) are all channels designed for handling complaint. It is precisely because of these channels exist that more a unconventional method of complaint is more notable and thus potentially more effective. In such cases involving a local business, you are most definitely wasting someone's time, far beyond the bounds of deleting or invalidating a bug tracking ticket.

As a qualification, I recognize that, depending on the topic of protest, there can be a gap/disconnect in the severity of the topic of protest. The cultural go-to for the words "sit-in protest" evokes imagery of the American civil-rights era, whereas this is an affiliate monetization scheme for an open source operating system. Yet there are other topics which have drawn sit-in protests over the decades, and drawing upon these I feel that my metaphor is apt.

(edit: eckyptang beat me to the punch while I was typing this longwinded and nuanced response)

k3n3• 14 years ago

Furthermore, to the sit-in analogy, I would never have heard of this "grep -R" bug if not for the novel protest medium. I think this alone gives credence to its effectiveness.

chimeracoder2• 14 years ago

I think many HN readers will agree that an inconsistent or nonsensical user experience is, in many situations, a bug.

As noted in the comments on the bug, there is a disconnect between the features available at the command-line and available through the GUI; except in the

Second, when you have issues like these[1] popping up, as well as the corresponding privacy concerns, I think it's perfectly fine to illustrate that with a polite bug that illustrates more clearly how silly it is to integrate this feature into an operating system (by default).

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-lens-shoppin...

fmoralesc• 14 years ago

What about [ubuntu's bug #1](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1)?

sp332• 14 years ago

Also bug #1,000,000 https://bugs.launchpad.net/edubuntu/+bug/1000000

tomrod• 14 years ago

Snark aside, it's a valid point. Shouldn't CLI tools mimic GUI tools?

phogster• 14 years ago

No.

peterwwillis2• 14 years ago

Why?

Flimm• 14 years ago

I suppose some people might find a use for a CLI interface to the dash's search engine. Changing the behaviour of `grep -R` is definitely not the correct answer, though.

chimeracoder2• 14 years ago

> Changing the behaviour of `grep -R` is definitely not the correct answer, though.

What about changing the behavior of grep -r?

(Sorry, I just couldn't resist. When I first clicked the link, I actually thought this was a reference to the GNU grep changes at first).

jlgreco12• 14 years ago

Ding ding ding.

If you want a CLI equivalent of "ubuntu-dash", then you have to make one. grep is not it.

And as far as I am concerned, anyone who honestly finds themselves wishing cli tools worked like gui tools should knock themselves out. I'm sure plenty of people would find it useful.

jrajav• 14 years ago

You can elegantly present advertising and other non-essential elements alongside the main content of a GUI interface.

There is no elegant way to do this with a CLI interface since it is not a static interface, it is a stream of characters. Anything that's not content will have to be inline with user-generated input and output. It would be like a weather app with ads in the middle of the sun icon.

subhro• 14 years ago

>It would be like a weather app with ads in the middle of the sun icon.

The analogy is just awesome!! Thanks a ton for bringing a smile on a gloomy day :)

tedunangst4• 14 years ago

The amazon results are effectively inline with regular results (placed just after, but with the same appearance). There's no reason grep could not also list a few amazon products with URLs after the regular results.

Newky• 14 years ago

Not sure whether they should mimic GUI tools, however having tools which provide a graphical user interface, but are fully functional (or at least as much as is possible) from the CLI is the ideal way for a program to be in my opinion.

Where applicable, a command line option can be a great supplement when something that can be achieved via the GUI . For example, encoding a video to a certain codec, having a visual wrapper on this is a nice to have if converting one video or a few videos. However if that same application allows the ability to encode thousands of videos using the CLI option, its an added ability that is appreciated.

VMG2• 14 years ago

    quake3cli --map anarki -e '(walk-forward) (rotate 0.2) (fire)'

jimktrains2• 14 years ago

Hmm, would I use -e - or will it read from stdin if I don't supply -e?

How do I pipe to it?

tedunangst4• 14 years ago

Sarcasm? Not the best counterexample, as that's how lots of bots work. The AI engine does not exclusively work by rendering the scene and attempting to visually identify targets.

statictype• 14 years ago

No.

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

It would have been a more effective snark if it came with a pull request.

kami8845• 14 years ago

Then it wouldn't have had this bit:

>Please can you change the grep warez to have this feature, and just install it on my machine while I'm down the pub, after all you do "erm, have root", so it should be easy for you to do :-)

which made the post for me

benwerd• 14 years ago

Awesome that Shuttleworth replied, and in good humor.

I still totally buy that ads are step one to Ubuntu integrating more closely with Amazon, and the latter making a pretty bold device play.

ww520• 14 years ago

Are people this bored that they start trolling open source bug database?

ahi• 14 years ago

You read it, then commented on it. So I think you answered your own question.

creat03• 14 years ago

The saddest part is this probably offended some people.

For the troubled Ubuntu user who still has a sense of humor and an ounce of common sense, I recommend Linux From Scratch. Time to start over.

gbaygon• 14 years ago

For the "lazy" power user that doesn't want to build everything from scratch I recommend Archlinux.

creat03• 14 years ago

The thing with LFS is that it would cause Linux users to learn. Not necessarily a bad thing. And I would predict it could lower their tolerance for the lots of the garbage that many ditributions force on them. (Like this brilliant move by Ubuntu!) Who knows, it could lead to a more DIY capable userbase.

They would not have to ask anyone how to remove things or plead with decision-makers to implement their desired changes, they'd just do it themselves.

But yeah, from what I know the Arch Linux distribution imposes a very minimal amount of "pre-configuration".

I've always found it easier to add stuff to a bare bones OS configuration than to remove it from a pre-configured one (you have to thoroughly understand what you're removing first; it's easy to break someone else's delicate Rube Goldberg contraption). But maybe that's just me.

FuzzyDunlop• 14 years ago

This lacks ambition.

    $> cd ~/Movies/Avengers
       ... people who changed into this directory were also interested in
       Marvel Avengers Assemble [DVD]        £10.00


    $> ls ~
       Desktop   Downloads   Movies   Music   Pictures
       ... related items
       Intelliplug - Desktop Version    £12.95

dchichkov• 14 years ago

   $> gcc -o test test.c

      test.c:1:22: iostream.h: No such file or directory
      ... people who encountered this error often purchase
      GCC For Professionals [Hardcover]  £12.95

SilasX2• 14 years ago

Can someone explain the context of this? I'm not getting the references. I mean, I know what grep is, and I know the -R option, but ...

Is the joke that grep obviously has nothing to do with searching a server you're not on, and the submitter is pretending to be someone who expected that it would search Amazon for results? If so, that's stupid, and not even a clever joke.

However, from some of the comments, it sounds like real users (ones actually competent enough to be using grep) are expecting this functionality -- perhaps it doesn't work on some Amazon storage site?

cynwoody• 14 years ago

This is a reaction to the fact that, as of 12.10, the Ubuntu Unity "search lens" now includes Amazon results.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010538/now-in-ubuntu-linux-1...

SilasX2• 14 years ago

Okay, then he gets a solid "thumbs up" from me!

ksherlock• 14 years ago

Ubuntu 12.10 will include amazon ads on the desktop

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049

noobplusplus• 14 years ago

Slightly OT: But what are the characteristics of a clever joke? I found it funny enough. Just to analyze my own sense of humor.

gizmo686• 14 years ago

Shouldn't this be a bug in locate?

“grep -R doesn't automatically search amazon”

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