The first bit of evidence linked to by that article is glibc's maintainer complaining that he's being asked to improve the strfry() function, after a detailed technical analysis. If you don't know what strfry() is, that response does look unreasonable. But he's right! strfry() is, literally, a joke function.
Yet, it's there. I'd understand the reaction completely if it was an "It's broken. Fix it." bug report.
But this one is "It's broken, this is how, this is data confirming it, this is a patch and that's how it's fixing the issue." The work is done - review, apply, release. Or if it's considered such a joke that it's not worth fixing, just remove it completely.
It's only broken if you don't get the joke. Asking someone to review and merge a patch for strfry() is, if not unreasonable, then at least something that's reasonable to say "no" to.
When presented with a model bug report (includes good description, test cases, and even a patch) he felt the need to change the function, but instead of using the supplied patch he rewrites it himself and commits it without testing it. It is still broken. When this is pointed out he gets angry and complains about people wasting his time, when it was he that decided to waste his own time rewriting it his own way and he was the one that still got it wrong.
Everyone would have been better off if he had taken the sensible path of "read bug report", "confirm bug", "test patch", "commit patch" instead of arguing and rewriting things out of spite.
Seems to say it isn't used. I also contest that it _is_ broken. I cannot find a man page that promises that it uses a uniform distribution; one could even argue that such a function should not use an uniform distribution. For example, randomizing the non-uniformity of the distribution depending on the phase of the moon would, IMO, be a good idea for this function.
The strfry() function randomizes the contents of string by using rand(3) to randomly swap characters in the string. The result is an anagram of string.
[snip]
COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project. [snip]
What version of the man-pages package do you have installed?
Sorry, mine came from gnu.org and probably isn't really the man page (I misread a Google result).
In any case, I'm not wrong about strfry being a gag function, and it looks (if you read upthread) that my hunch was right that nobody uses it in real code.
It is a joke function. I really wish that the supplied documentation let potential users in on the joke. :)
(Oh, pardon. I didn't catch that you might have thought that I thought that strfry was anything but a joke. My take on the situation is that the documentation needs patched, rather than the strfry code. :) )
http://www.tuxradar.com/content/debian-ditches-glibc-eglibc
I consider all this a real attitude problem.