This exchange is a good demonstration that the word "trivial" has lost its meaning in the same way "literal" has. Much like I usually hear someone use term "literally" for figurative emphasis, these days I mostly hear the word "trivial" used to describe something which is clearly nontrivial.

Math textbooks have been doing this for decades, but it's leaked into common parlance with online discussion.

I believe in the mathematical community the potentially offensive term for outsiders is non-trivial, used in a technically correct manner, but oftentimes applied as synonymous of epically hard, which unexpectedly throws people off, especially the author of that non-trivial work!

I think the best translation of "trivial" when used amongst mathematicians is that it is something you should be able to figure out with your current knowledge without too much difficulty (though it might require an hour of thought). Said in another way, you don't need to learn/develop new tools or techniques for something that is trivial.

Of course this is not when most people think when they hear the word so really it's a term of art that should probably be avoided when talking to non-mathematicians.

> I think the best translation of "trivial" when used amongst mathematicians is that it is something you should be able to figure out with your current knowledge without too much difficulty

As i read through my old uni maths notes there are often wild leaps from a to e along with a little scrawl saying "trivially" or "obviously". They may have been true once, but god dammit 21 year old me was a knobber

It takes approximately a year to learn to walk after you are born. But almost everybody figures it out. And once they know, they practically never forget. So I don't know, is it not trivial?

I have never had to support all of the mobile environments of DropBox nor the scale, so I cannot claim that my 99% solution would ever meet their 99.999% requirements. But I have been able to package Python apps for Mac OSX, WinVista, Win7, Ubuntu, and CentOS at the same time using that strategy.

Being charitable, I think the parent means that the python developer sticks all the dependencies in a directory and creates a bash script to set PYTHONPATH and launch. The user receives a directory rather than an executable, but only has to use the bash script, rather than worry about any of the Python in the directory.

Now your lovingly created cross-platform app is back to linux only because you used bash to invoke it.

Use a Python script instead.

Nah, he should use some turtles instead.