

A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass (1999) - thealphanerd
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=506636+517178+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-hackers/19991003.freebsd-hackers

======
AlexMax
Reading that again made me wonder who Brett Glass was. Apparently, I wasn't
the only one:

[http://www.quora.com/Hacker-Culture/Who-was-Brett-Glass-
as-n...](http://www.quora.com/Hacker-Culture/Who-was-Brett-Glass-as-named-in-
the-original-bikeshed-email)

Brett Glass himself shows up to answer.

~~~
byroot
Fixed link: [http://www.quora.com/Hacker-Culture/Who-was-Brett-Glass-
as-n...](http://www.quora.com/Hacker-Culture/Who-was-Brett-Glass-as-named-in-
the-original-bikeshed-email?share=1)

~~~
ronaldx
Brett Glass's statement of rebuttal here is an amusing addition to the story
and worth reading (even if you probably won't be on his side).

~~~
vinceguidry
After re-reading both accounts, it's clear to me that Brett misunderstood
Poul-Henning's argument. Poul-Henning said to "just build the damn bikeshed, I
don't care what color it is," whereas Brett said, "Poul-Henning's assertion
that all such ideas should be dismissed as "bikeshedding" reflects this
dismissive attitude"

I read Poul-Henning's argument, which did not say that ideas should be
dismissed, but rather 'just built', as attempting to contribute to a
constructive spirit, and Glass's argument as defending the broken management
process.

------
Argorak
This is one of the rare emails that got its own website. It is also one of the
rare websites where changing the color on reload is okay.

[http://bikeshed.org/](http://bikeshed.org/)

~~~
misnome
Or, for whatever you prefer:
[http://yellow.bikeshed.org/](http://yellow.bikeshed.org/)

(The same site also seems to be on bikeshed.com, which is where I remembered
it)

------
PhasmaFelis
I'm really curious what the issues were with the proposal to make FreeBSD
sleep accept non-integer arguments.

~~~
bananas
It depends on how sleep(3) is implemented really. Usually sleep means
approximately one second resolution. If you start adding fractional second
sleeps, say 1.5ms is required, you start moving into real time space at which
point the kernel API, userland C runtime and all sorts have to change.

Plus there are good reasons not to arbitrarily sleep for sub-second times for
the sake of the scheduler. You probably should be using select or other event
driven programming models rather than relying on delays.

~~~
_delirium
Fwiw, on recent FreeBSDs nanosleep(2) is the system call, which is what both
sleep(3) and sleep(1) use, the former with whole numbers of seconds, and the
latter with fractional seconds.

