Introducing the Bikeshed Package!

From https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2010-August/031110.html :

James Westby jw+debian at jameswestby.net

Wed Aug 11 17:41:16 BST 2010

On Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:32:34 -0400, Dustin Kirkland wrote:

> We have some initiatives right now, trying to make it easier for

> people to get new applications into Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu Software

> Center. This is merely a 10-line, GPL'd shell script, and most

> developers agree on its usefulness. But the experience of giving this

> code away for the benefit of others is less than ideal. I'm happy to

> persevere, push it to the right place, do the right thing. But will

> the next aspiring developer who wants to share a small, useful hack

> bother themselves with the process?

Maybe as an Ubuntu core-dev you want to upload a useful-hacks package

and accept all contributions in this vein in to that?

Thanks,

James

Like many of you, I have some useful scripts in my $HOME/bin directory, and aliases in my $HOME/.bashrc.

I have contributed some of these to existing open source projects, while others have turned into stand-alone free software packages/projects themselves. In other cases, I have tried, with great heartache, to contribute useful utilities to open source projects. Sometimes these work out eventually, but it can take many months or years of persistence to win the approval of some maintainers. These are most certainly battles worth fighting, but in the meantime, there are many Ubuntu users and developers who could benefit from these tools.

Per the suggestion from James Westby in the note above, I have founded the bikeshed project at http://launchpad.net/bikeshed. You can grab the source code with:

  bzr branch lp:bikeshed

And you can install the package from the Bikeshed PPA for Karmic, Lucid, and Maverick if you like. It just landed in Natty today.

The mission statement of the project is:

• While others debate where some tool should go, we put it in the bikeshed.

The package description goes into a little more detail:

• Description: random useful tools that do not yet have a permanent home
  Bikeshed is a collection of random but useful tools and utilities that either don't quite fit anywhere else, or have not yet been accepted by a more appropriate project. Think of this package as an "orphanage", where tools live until they are adopted by loving, accepting parents.

The name of the project reflects the tremendous insight provided by Poul-Henning Kamp on a FreeBSD mailing list in 1999. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend you do. It's 11 years old and directed toward FreeBSD development, but it applies to ubuntu-devel@ and debian-devel@ and most other software development mailing lists just as well today.

The general concept is known as Parkinson's Law of Triviality, from 1957, when C. Northcote Parkinson described the unfortunate effects of trivial matters carrying disproportionate weight (and actually first used the bike shed example).

I'm going to describe each utility in bikeshed in a series of posts here in my blog. Hopefully you will find some of them very useful!

:-Dustin