After some reflection, I’ve removed this Easter egg. It’ll be gone in the upcoming man-db 2.8.0.
I’m glad that it made some people smile, which after all was the whole purpose of it, and my Twitter notifications and so on today suggest that most people thought it was more amusing than annoying. Still, some people did find it annoying, and six years seems like a pretty good run for that sort of thing; it probably isn’t going to get significantly better exposure than it already unexpectedly has by way of this question. Time to put it to bed.
I thought they just fixed it in the particular case of
man -w?It was removed completely soon after: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/406169/383346
ok that’s a pretty fair decision