bikeshed

[Daniel C. Sobral]

Bill Moran wrote:
> 
> Thus "building a bikeshed" has become a euphamism for discussing
> relatively unimportant details into the ground.

Just to point out a few examples, whenever someone wants to tweak with 
the rc scripts, or discuss what sysinstall should or shouldn't do, or 
even if we should bundle sendmail or not, everyone pipes in and nothing 
gets done.

When someone recently discussed a major restructuring of inet's 
forwarding and routing methods, a single person piped in (well, besides 
the ones who cheered, like me :).

Now, whether we bundle sendmail or not is essentially irrelevant. Even 
if you abhor whatever we do, it is a most trivial thing for a sysadmin 
to replace whatever it is with something else.

The forwarding and routing changes, on the other hand, will affect every 
single system that uses IPv4. It will most assuredly result in a 
modification of the performances tradeoffs (eg, workstations with a 
single route vs heavy routers with thousands), it _will_ change the 
speed with which each packet is sent out of a host, and will even change 
things like MTU Path Discovery (if I read that right :). And there's 
*nothing* any sysadmin will be able to do about it, except chose another OS.

Now, before I scare everyone, it is my belief that any measurable 
changes in performance will be positive. :-) But this illustrates quite 
well the "bikeshed" thingy.

-- 
Daniel C. Sobral			(8-DCS)
dcs at newsguy.com
dcs at freebsd.org
capo at west.side.of.bsdconspiracy.net

	Steele: "Aha! We've finally got you talking jargon too!"
	Stallman: "What did he say?"
	Steele: "Bob just used "canonical" in the canonical way."