Uh, Seriously? Why would you run any command without knowing its purpose? Should they also disable 'rm' because idiots wipe their system with that as well?
Sure the maintainer is being a bit lazy about the issue but everyone always thinks their problems are the most important in the world. Everyone criticizing him is failing to question whether he may have more critical bugs, ones where a stupid user isn't involved.
I see a problem with a maintainer like that. Even if he thinks this is not a critical bug: 1) he could fix it in the time he took to argue the user made a stupid mistake (twice!) 2) he should've never said stuff like that as a member of the official Canonical team - in most real companies, he'd get at least a disciplinary meeting
Even if he had more important stuff to do in the meantime, it's no reason to be a jerk about it. If things like that don't get corrected the first time it happens, the history will repeat, but you'll be the one running the script the next time.
About the actual question: Why would you run any command without knowing its purpose? -- User knew the command's purpose. He didn't know that a parameter is required though. It was not documented apart from the source.
Name any commonly used Linux executable that deletes the server root when run without any arguments, with no confirmation or warning.
It's a little unexpected.
Even after reading the script, you may not catch the fact that not setting the right environment variable causes massive damage--it's not documented anywhere.
This isn't on Linux, granted, but killall will ignore its arguments and kill ALL accessible processes on a number of other UNIX-like OSes (such as Solaris).
I'd consider the name killall to be both an explanation and a warning. But yeah - I made that mistake once on Solaris. That's why you should never have applications like that. Even shutdown needs some option for scheduling when it should work.
Even then - neither killall or shutdown is as serious as deleting the root partition. It's the difference between a reboot and a complete reinstall/restore from backup.
Lazy is not the word. It would take less time to fix then it would to make a smart ass response. This guy has some personality problem, or is having a bad day.
Sure the maintainer is being a bit lazy about the issue but everyone always thinks their problems are the most important in the world. Everyone criticizing him is failing to question whether he may have more critical bugs, ones where a stupid user isn't involved.