Sat 06 Feb 2016 06:43:52 AM UTC, original submission:
I discovered GNU Parallel recently, and it's been very helpful.
But after about the 10th time of seeing eleven lines of text at the top of my job output that virtually accuses me of plagiarism and tries to shame me into including a citation in publications which I will never be writing in the first place, I finally decided to stop the actual work I was doing and re-run the command with the '--bibtex' option to silence that distracting output...
...only to be assaulted by a terminal full of:
Type: 'will cite' and press enter.
>
This was repeated until it filled my terminal's scrollback buffer. I then had to Ctrl+C the job and run plain 'parallel --bibtex', then type 'will cite', then hit Enter...and then, finally, I was able to actually do the work I was trying to do without being rudely interrupted by eleven lines of output.
The eleven lines of text is offensive, annoying, and substantially interferes with the work the user's attempting to do. But to then, after the user follows the directions to use the '--bibtex' option to silence these notices, force him to type 'will cite' as if he's promising to stop doing something morally wrong (like /use the software/?), is even more insulting. It reeks of shareware and nagware, with 15-day trials and "You are required to register this software after your trial expires. Click here to promise to register this software and stop being an evil thief" dialogs.
I've been using GNU/Linux for at least 15 years, and I can't recall any other software, GNU or otherwise, that treats users in this manner. I appreciate the many hours of hard work that has been put into this project, but if projects like Emacs don't treat their users this way, why should GNU Parallel? Quite frankly, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and discourages me from wanting to lend any support to the project as-is.
I hope the project will remove this notice. Instead, a short, one-or-two-line notice could be placed in the '--help' message and the man page, which is reasonable and common in other projects.
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