Scaffolding is the automated creation of a skeleton structure to simplify bootstrapping (of new modules, in the case of Odoo).
While not necessary it avoids the tedium of setting up basic structures and looking up what all starting requirements are.
Scaffolding is available via the odoo.py scaffold subcommand.
template
a template directory, files are passed through jinja2 then copied to the destination directory
name
the name of the module to create, may munged in various manners to generate programmatic names (e.g. module directory name, model names, )
destination

Note-The default configuration file is $HOME/.openerp_serverrc which can be overridden using --config. Specifying --save will save the current configuration state back to that file.