NAME
biff -- be notified if mail arrives and who it is from
[…]
HISTORY
The biff command appeared in 4.0BSD. It was named after the dog of
Heidi Stettner. He died in August 1993, at 15.
Eric Cooper, a student contemporary to Foderero and
Stettner, reports that the dog would bark at the mail
carrier,[4][5] making it a natural choice for the name
of a mail notification system. Stettner herself
contradicts this.[3][6]
Heidi would bring her dog with her to class and to her office. He was a very friendly dog, and a lot of the students enjoyed throwing a ball for him down the corridor to fetch. He even had his picture on the bulletin board with the graduate students: the legend read that he was working on his Ph.Dog. John decided to name the program after the dog: Biff. According to Heidi, John and Bill Joy then spent a lot of time trying to compose an explanation for biff - they came up with "Be notified if mail arrived." Biff, who died in August 1993, at 15, once got a B in a compiler class. According to Heidi, the story of Biff barking at the mailman is a scurrilous canard.
One of my favourite bits of trivia from that excellent book, but hardly anyone I bump into these days knows anything about that kind of multi-user Unix experience/environment these days. I barely caught any of it myself.
In any case, I've renamed the project to bttf: https://github.com/BurntSushi/bttf/pull/14
The name comes from the fact that Biff is a character in Back to the Future, and it rhymes with Jiff[1]. Jiff is the datetime library that Biff uses.
"Make like a tree and get out of here!" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9Jabplo2pZU
collisions, lol
% apt-cache search biff
biff - a mail notification tool
gnubiff - mail notification program for GNOME (and others)
wmbiff - Dockable app that displays information about mailboxes
xlbiff - mail notification pop-up with configurable message scans
1. Not precise name collisions.
2. All mail-notification utilities, as was the original biff.
And since we're mentioning Debian, it has a policy requiring unique names within the Debian archive to be unique. Precedence goes to the earlier software packaged. Installed programs must also have unique names within a given system. The datetime Swiss army knife utility discussed here violates both policies.
As Debian policy is used both for Debian and derived distros (see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions#De...> for a partial listing), it has considerable influence.
<https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=btff>
Might want to ping the mods (hn@ycombinator.com) to update this submission title.
So if I do an "apt install biff" on Debian (or Ubuntu) what will happen?
* https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=biff
If I type in "biff" on a Debian CLI, what should I expect the behaviour of the program that is executed to be? Will it be something about mail or time?
<https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-binary.html#the-...>
// backronym bttf stands for biff time to format
I still want one of those hover boards!
https://preview.redd.it/75ojrs5mzfcg1.jpeg?width=1024&auto=w...
I think fewer people now care about mail notifications in a terminal session than about wrangling datetimes on the command line.