Oleg Bartunov: About "bikeshedding" in Postgres world

Some of my younger colleagues by Postgres Professional, who recently open the world of postgres hackers, sometimes wonder about meaning some jargon words, which they don't well understand. Recent example was "that should be orange", which I didn't understand myself well, so I asked Bruce for the meaning. I'm not sure I got an idea, what does it means, Bruce :)

One of the popular jargon word is "bikeshedding", which came from FreeBSD world and introduced to it-world by phk (http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed.html). I like his quote from "Parkinson's Law":

Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of directors and
get approval for building a multi-million or even billion dollar
atomic power plant, but if you want to build a bike shed you will
be tangled up in endless discussions.


Translated to our reality it means, that community is inclined to discuss some simple topics, while leaving very interesting patches without attention. I explain that to myself, that there are more people who understand simple/common topics and could participate in discussion, than developers who understand some very specific and difficult patch.

btw, the first time it was used by Jim Nasby (Decibel! <decibel@decibel.org>) in 2007.

select sent, ts_headline(body_plain, to_tsquery('bikeshedding'),'StartSel="",StopSel=""')  from messages where body_tsvector @@ to_tsquery('bikeshedding') order by sent asc;
        sent         |                                           ts_headline
---------------------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 2007-08-10 18:04:28 | bikeshedding on this list list is a very big danger.
                     | Advocacy is something everyone feels
 2008-02-20 14:55:14 | bikeshedding can start as to how to "use" it through the SQL interface.
                     |
                     | But, until
 2008-02-20 15:03:49 | bikeshedding can start as to how to "use" it through the SQL interface.
                     | >
                     | > But, until
 2009-02-08 16:46:59 | back and rip that functionality back out of his patch.
                     | Sounds like bikeshedding to me.
                     |
                     | ...Robert
 2009-04-14 05:04:36 | close to bikeshedding now...