EDIT: OK, I misunderstood. That paragraph is there even in the original blog post, but the author didn't pick up how to get their desired behaviour until they read the code. Also, there's the "boot time regen" vs "login time regen" change between Debian & Ubuntu.
It's hard to say in retrospect how obvious that clause is, but there's no reason the original author couldn't have raised a bug with Debian saying they didn't understand the man page, and can Debian please add another sentence saying "To have a static motd, delete the /etc/motd symlink and replace it with a plain text file." Ranting won't make it better, but a polite suggestion might.
Ditto raising a suggestion with Ubuntu about replacing "boot time" with "login time" in their manpage.
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Except from the motd man page on Ubuntu oneiric:
On Debian GNU/Linux this file is a symbolic link pointing to /var/run.
The contents of this file are regenerated upon every system boot based on the contents of /etc/motd.tail.
I can see the original author's frustration, but I got to the end of the post and thought "why didn't he submit a bug report mentioning the motd man page needed updating?"
Yes, this was a mistake in Ubuntu. Nevertheless, it didn't seem like one that the Ubuntu developers would be unwilling or incapable of fixing. In fact, lo and behold, it has been fixed!
I can see there's a broader point here in general, regarding the philosophy of "change vs not-change." However, that point doesn't seem to necessitate quite so much nerdrage.
"On Debian GNU/Linux this file is a symbolic link pointing to /var/run. The contents of this file"
That second 'this file' is ambiguous. I think the grammatically/semantically/whateveryoucallitally best interpretation (by a tiny margin) would be that both 'this file' would talk about the same file, but I am not sure, and I think that, in the real world, that is the incorrect interpretation.
It's hard to say in retrospect how obvious that clause is, but there's no reason the original author couldn't have raised a bug with Debian saying they didn't understand the man page, and can Debian please add another sentence saying "To have a static motd, delete the /etc/motd symlink and replace it with a plain text file." Ranting won't make it better, but a polite suggestion might.
Ditto raising a suggestion with Ubuntu about replacing "boot time" with "login time" in their manpage.
---
Except from the motd man page on Ubuntu oneiric:
On Debian GNU/Linux this file is a symbolic link pointing to /var/run. The contents of this file are regenerated upon every system boot based on the contents of /etc/motd.tail.
I can see the original author's frustration, but I got to the end of the post and thought "why didn't he submit a bug report mentioning the motd man page needed updating?"
Yes, this was a mistake in Ubuntu. Nevertheless, it didn't seem like one that the Ubuntu developers would be unwilling or incapable of fixing. In fact, lo and behold, it has been fixed!
I can see there's a broader point here in general, regarding the philosophy of "change vs not-change." However, that point doesn't seem to necessitate quite so much nerdrage.