Today’s rant: What is ‘bikeshedding’ ?
I knew the general concept of this word but it was thrown around today so I decided to research it.
Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (also known as the bicycle shed example, and by the expression colour of the bikeshed) is C. Northcote Parkinson’s 1957 argument that organisations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. source
Made famous in software development by Poul-Henning Kamp (FreeBSD dev)
“The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.” source
Seems to be true to me. We shouldn’t needlessly argue about trivial details.
I leave you with this..Is there a software development group in existence that does not bikeshed?:
Futile investment of time and energy in marginal technical issues, often including annoying propaganda. (as defined by Wiktionary)
I doubt it, but is it always a bad thing? Comments?
I don’t know if it’s appropriate to discuss the subject of bikeshedding here. We should form a comitee to come up with some guidelines regarding this issue.
I’d like to posit that if the discussion involves package managers in Gentoo the amount of noise grows exponentially.
Yay for my post mentioning it! =:^) http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/59237
That was, I believe, the first time I had used the term in that form. I was of course familiar with the analogy, but had only recently come across the single-word verb form “bikeshedding”, and must say I was rather proud of myself for actually spotting such a perfect opportunity to use it before anyone else got to it! =:^)
(I actually debated a comment that it was my first use in the post, but decided it wasn’t apropos, so avoided it.)
So yeah, I’m glad I stimulated someone else into doing a bit of research and now their first use of the term as well. But I’m still surprised nobody else pointed out the bikeshedding before I did (and kicking myself for not seeing it in time to get it in my first thread post), obvious as the tone was in the discussion.
Duncan
Well, the /var/lib discussion IMO is only “bikeshedding” if you see it as “should we use /var/lib or /var/lib/gentoo for Gentoo related packages?”, however for me it was about “is there any reason to change things?”. I have a strong dislike for proposals that come without any justification, as you can never check if a solution fixes the problem, if there are better solutions available, or if the problem does actually exist, without knowing what the (perceived) problem actually is.
Guess I should have avoided mentioing the FHS stuff in the first place as it just distracted from the real discussion.
Having strong opinions about matters others consider trivial is one of the things that differentiates free software from compromise-laden committee-designed software. As such, IMHO bikeshedding is an essential part of FOSS culture.
“The devil is in the details” (– shared by Torvalds, among others).