On Sat, 8 Dec 2018 23:36:33 -0800
Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

> On Tuesday, December 4, 2018, 2:06:17 PM EST, Steve Litt
> <slitt@???> wrote:
> > On Mon, 3 Dec 2018 13:42:36 +0000
> > Rowland Penny <rpenny@???> wrote:
> >
> > > On Mon, 3 Dec 2018 13:22:40 +0000
> > > g4sra <g4sra@???> wrote:
> >
> > > >
> > > > Interestingly little mention of workstation BOOTP, NFS Root,
> > > > Cloning On Boot. Manually applying CCR's in each training room
> > > > of 28+ workstations is going to be a pita. No one mentioned the
> > > > likes of Puppet, Ansible, ClusterSSH etc.
> > > > 
> > >
> > > This is probably down to the very little information you
> > > provided, I also have no idea what 'Creedence Clearwater Revival'
> > > has to do with anything we are discussing ;-)
> >
> > I can answer that. We all figure that someday people won't spout
> > uncommon and unagreed upon acronyms. But someday never comes.
>
> For the record, I can confidently predict that the intended reference
> was Change Control Request, an essential element of a controlled
> environment with complex local configurations and/or locally developed
> software.

See, that's exactly my point. Some of us code in uncontrolled
environments, and do it quite well. Some of us code as one-man-bands,
and there's nobody to write a Change Control Request (CCR). Some of us
don't code at all.

There's nothing about participation in DNG that implies any familiarity
with CCRs (cool to abbreviate now because I earlier spelled it out and
introduced the acronym). I searched my local (admittedly incomplete
due to deletions and plonking) DNG archives and found two uses of
spelled out "Change Control Request", one being the email I'm
responding to and one being an email from Rick Moen on 11/7/2018. A
similar search for "CCR" found one use of "pam-ccreds" on 1/22/2016,
the uses we've seen in this thread, and a whole bunch of things like
"accross" and "accretion" "accreditation" and random appearance within
a PGP signature.

In other words, there's absolutely no reason to believe that use of the
acronym "CCR" would be understood by everyone or a vast majority of
people on DNG. So why not introduce its first use with the whole
spelled out word, so an interested party can at least look it up rather
than trying to chase it down in an acronym dictionary, which is always
a huge time sink?

I'm not singling out the OP (Original Poster) here. I'd say between 1/4
and 1/2 of technical humanity, during communications, regularly pulls an
acronym out of their RO (Rear Orifice) without regard to their
audience, and without introducing it. Such introduction eliminates
time-consuming searches with guesswork in acronym dictionaries, and
ambiguities for those without sufficient time to search acronym
dictionaries.

Sometimes I wonder why 1/4 to 1/2 of us fail to introduce. On my
charitable days I chalk it up to an oversight. On more stressed days I
figure the acronymist is trying to make himself smart by knowing
something others don't. And on my cynical days, I figure the guy's some
silly WAD just trying to get over. For those of you not knowing what a
WAD is, see page 4 of the slideshow at
http://troubleshooters.com/utp/ninja_presentation.pdf .

I'm not the most technical guy on this list. 99% of you know more about
package management than I. 99% are better devops than I. 95% are better
admins. 90% are better coders. But take it from a guy who was taught,
by Sams Publishing, exactly how to write understandably and
unambiguously, so I could be the Main Author of Samba Unleashed:
Introduce all acronyms that are not by their nature used by the vast
majority of your audience. Save your readers' time, and increase your
credibility (nobody in the know is really impressed by a WAD).

Once again, I'm not dissing the OP. This is a general statement.

SteveT

Steve Litt
December 2018 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21