Re: RFC: Changing the doc name and authors

[Paul Eggert]

Akim Demaille <address@hidden> writes:

> shouldn't we s/Bison/GNU Bison/ btw?

Historically, the name "Bison" has not been prefixed by "GNU", as it's
a funnier joke if you omit the "GNU".

This reminds me of the time when some documentation factotum at Sun
Microsystems was editing the tunefs(8) man page, and decided to remove
Kirk McKusick's joke "You can tune a file system, but you can't tuna
fish" because the factotum didn't understand the joke, or couldn't
translate it into French, or some factotumish thing like that.

Larry McVoy put the joke back in with the troff comment:

.\" Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until
.\" the time_t's wrap around.

but the factotum deleted the joke again!

McVoy left Sun -- I don't know whether over this or other matters.
But it's now the longest-running curse in the computing industry, and
unless Sun relents they'll continue to have bad luck until the year 2038.

So let's not call it "GNU Bison".  It might bring bad luck.