

“grep -R doesn't automatically search amazon” - shrikant
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bug/1055766

======
famousactress
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._

~~~
blahedo
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 ?_

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

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

~~~
k3n
Ignoring something in a public forum like this won't simply make it "go away",
though.

There are 100's if not 1000's of eyes on this already (and likely 1000's more
now that it's being shared on news aggregators).

------
FuzzyDunlop
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

       $> 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

------
jbermudes
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
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.

~~~
krichman
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.

------
bnr
Great to see Shuttleworth taking it easy...

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

[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
terminal/+bu...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-
terminal/+bug/1055766/comments/13)

~~~
engtech
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/

------
SilasX
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
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...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010538/now-in-ubuntu-
linux-12-10-integrated-amazon-search-results.html)

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

------
menacingly
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.

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

~~~
VMG

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

~~~
jimktrains2
Hmm, would I use -e - or will it read from stdin if I don't supply -e?

How do I pipe to it?

~~~
gknoy
I imagine you'd read from /dev/random, if you wanted to play as well as I do.
All joking aside, I imagine that one could easily write a bot that allowed one
to give it heuristics via STDIN or a command line parameter.

I doubt many would do it this way, but it would be consistent with the unix
design ethos. One program would manage the Playing the Game and perhaps
providing an API for interacting with the game, or even a pluggable section of
games, and another would handle generating heuristics (or retrieving them).

Then you could, e.g.:

multibot -g quake3 --name "Rocket Llama" -h rockets.lua multibot -g quake3
--name "Ash" -h shotgun-only.lua cat /dev/urandom | multibot -g quake3 --name
"Confused"

multibot -g civ3 --name "Dr. No" -h well-defended-island.lua multibot -g civ3
--name "Dr. Evil" -h meeeeelion.lua

That'd be a nightmare to implement, of course. :-)

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

~~~
kami8845
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
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
Are people this bored that they start trolling open source bug database?

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

------
creat0
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
For the "lazy" power user that doesn't want to build everything from scratch I
recommend Archlinux.

~~~
creat0
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.

~~~
icelancer
>The thing with LFS is that it would cause Linux users to learn. Not
necessarily a bad thing.

This is exactly why I stopped using RHEL and other distros back in the late
90's. I am very interested in learning - to some extent. Writing my own
goddamned drivers for my ADSL modem was not what I had in mind. Canonical and
Ubuntu have made huge strides forward for Linux in the marketplace.

~~~
creat0
Yeah, but who said anything about writing drivers? Very few people can do
that. How about just really basic stuff, like how to not have ads for Amazon
popping up when there is no need?

The driver issue is, in my opinion, the single biggest problem with not using
Windows or Mac. If you just jump right into that issue i.e. that the latest
driver for your peripehral is not going to be available for some time and
ignore all the other benefits of Linux and other UNIX-like systems, then you
could pretty easily conclude these systems are worthless. Hardware
manufacturers don't care about them. They only care about Windows and Mac.

But we all know these other systems like Linux are far from worthless.

Clearly, there is some middle ground.

You can still do a heck of a lot without the source code for the 2012 driver
for Whiz Bang Hardware Component.

If Canonical and Ubuntu decided not to accept any binary blobs I wonder if the
"strides" would seem as huge.

~~~
icelancer
These days Ubuntu has made some seriously poor decisions; I won't deny that
(Unity is a joke, this Amazon thing is a huge lol). But Canonical was vital in
the push to get Linux on the desktop and to be accepted as more than a
"hacker's playground" that is too hard to use for the average person.

Chromebooks and other low-cost appliances like it are successful in large part
because of how easy Ubuntu/Canonical made it to transfer into the Linux world
from Windows.

I personally use an Ubuntu 11.x build for everything these days (minus some
plain Debian builds on my ARM7 devices), and I really like what they've done
for Linux - even if the present stuff they've done has been a little stupid.

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

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

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

------
gizmo686
Shouldn't this be a bug in locate?

