Re: DAK Commands for Bikesheds
Hi,
Philip Hands wrote:
> Colin Tuckley <colint@debian.org> writes:
>
> > On 18/09/15 22:23, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
> >
> >> what the heck bikesheds are.
> >
> > What you seem to not be understanding, possibly because English is not
> > your first language, is that anything associated with the term
> > 'bikeshed' is very *negative*.
> >
> > They have strong derogatory connotations, so much so that I doubt any
> > native English speaker will be interested in them.
>
> Utter nonsense ... or are you trying to claim that Steve, Wookey, Neil,
> Paul and I are not native English speakers now?
>
> I dispute your claim that "bikesheds", as opposed to "bikeshedding", is
> negative -- if it were, we'd store our velocipedes in the cycle lock-up.
Not *all* things described as "bike sheds" take on the derogatory
connotation. For instance, as in your example, an actual shed used to
store actual bikes is taking on a purely descriptive and non-pejorative
meaning when called a "bike shed". Forgive me for making this very
obvious point.
However, there is no effective distinction between "bike shed" (n., v.,
or adj.) and "bikeshedding" when used metaphorically in the context of
software development. In fact, the word "bikeshedding" does not even
appear in the famous essay (http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed.html,
and note the mirrors at http://bikeshed.org/ and http://shed.bike/ whose
URLs also use the "-ing"'less form.)
...and, did anyone notice that the actual commands [0] abbreviate
"bikeshed" to "bs" (why? is there a length limit?)? Which has a
euphemistic meaning which is much more widely known than "bikeshed" and
which is far more pejorative.
[0] https://ftp-master.debian.org/users/joerg/README.commands
--
Robert Edmonds
edmonds@debian.org
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