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Subject:Re: Code Annotation of the Week From:Laura Lemay <lemay -at- lauralemay -dot- com> To:techwr-l mailinglist <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:54:26 -0800
On Nov 12, 2009, at 9:51 AM, I wrote:
> That reminds me, Janice, were you around at Sun for the Great
> tunefs(8) Scandal of 1990?
That message was just a bit cryptic. This is a story from the mists
of documentation history.
Back in the early 90's most of Sun's business was selling Unix
workstations. And a good part of the documentation load at Sun was
maintaining the existing man pages for the SunOS, the Unix OS that ran
on those machines. SunOS at the time was based on BSD. And one of
the BSD man pages was for tunefs, a command that, well, tunes a file
system (it's kind of like a defragmenter, only lower level).
In BSD Unix, since the beginning of time, tunefs man page had
included what is known as the "tuna fish" line:
You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish.
Some time in 1990, for the SunOS 4.1 release, an unnamed tech writer
at Sun removed that line.
I can't remember who reported it as a bug, if it was internal or
external, but it caused a HUGE FIGHT on the internal tech writer
mailing list at Sun. On one side: the argument that a joke, and a
pun at that, in Sun documentation was unprofessional, untranslatable,
and inappropriate. On the other: that this line was folklore, that
it had been in the man page forever, and that Unix history trumps
documentation professionalism. (no one knows how the line originally
ended up in the man page in the first place. There are rumors that
Bill Joy, one of the original authors of BSD, put it there.)
Eventually the folklore argument won, and the line went back in for
the next SunOS release. With it a writer included this comment in
the nroff source:
.\" Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until
.\" the time_t's wrap around.
.sp
You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish.
That comment itself contains a handful of unix puns, and its
appearance was noted with bemusement a few times throughout the years
by Unix folklorists.
SunOS was replaced altogether soon after that with the AT&T version of
Unix (what is known as SVr4), which does have tunefs but that doesn't
include the notorious tuna fish line. All current versions of Unix
based on BSD with tunefs still include the "tuna fish" line, including
HPUX, FreeBSD and MacOS X.
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