What are they talking about???

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday,  8 January 2004 at 11:59:41 -0800, Johnson David wrote:
> On Thursday 08 January 2004 09:05 am, Andrew Predoehl wrote:
>> Hello!  I'm reading with some interest the tempest that's a-blowin'
>> on -chat, and as a newbie, I just got here and I'm wondering what the
>> heck these people are talking about.  A few questions (not -questions
>> questions, just newbie questions):  What's bikeshedding, or a
>> bikeshed disagreement?  What's the heck are GEOM and SMP?  What's a
>> WIKI?  Anybody know a dictionary of these acronyms that I read all
>> the time?  I can figure out 90% of them but some of them (like PITA*)
>> leave me mystified...
>
> Ha!
>
> Bikeshedding is discussed in the FreeBSD FAQ. As far as I know (AFAIK),
> this term is only used regularly in the BSD communities. In essence, it
> refers to a Bikeshed Construction Committee, where people who know
> nothing about building bikesheds argue over what color the bikeshed
> should be. They're not doing this to be destructive or argumentative,
> but they are keenly interested in bikesheds, but not knowing anything
> about it, fallback to discussions of colors.

Hmm, not quite.  Building a bike shed isn't difficult, so everybody
wants to chip in.  By contrast, design considerations for SMP are
difficult, so only few people get involved.  The implication is thus
that simple questions get discussed to death, while the complicated
ones get few answers, quite the contrary of what people want.

Greg
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