mentoring new members (was: Re: prboom icon removed)

[Gerfried Fuchs <rhonda@deb.at>]

* Miriam Ruiz <little.miry@gmail.com> [2007-10-29 11:38:03 CET]:
> 2007/10/29, Eddy Petrișor <eddy.petrisor@gmail.com>:
> > Do you think my proposed solution (add people with a sponsor) is good enough?
> 
> I agree that having any newer member assigned to a former member of
> the team who becomes responsible for checking and mentoring them makes
> sense. Not that I want to restrict them access to SVN to those that I
> have assigned to me, but I'd understand that others might prefer to
> have patches delivered to them for a while before granting them
> permissions.

 I'm willing to write up some short'n'easy quicksteps about how to
do the svn checkout and produce a svn diff, mailing it to the mentor
(including suggested commit message so that part will get taken into
account, too), that shouldn't be too much hassle. And to be honest, I
see far more gain in having people in the team that understand that some
basic checkups are done before giving direct svn commit access, and
people that would shy away from that are usually not that big loss. I
wouldn't even be surprised if we not already have people listed as part
of the team that just signed up for the sake of it and never did
anything or neither really plan to do so in the future, at all...

> We should decide how to formally do it, so that we don't scare new
> members, they can have a fair amount of trust, and they can be
> mentored in our way of doing things inside the team.

 Usually people pretty much understand that trust is something that gets
earned and not thrown around like candies - such people make a far
better and especially longer lasting base to build on, they will trust
in return.

> Also.. will all this apply for newer DDs that join the team? I won't
> feel right if I had to mentor a DD myself.

 Personally I would be seriously puzzled about DDs creating seriously
broken stuff, and even though I do have some trust issues with some DDs
I consider them to be major enough to still work professional to some
degree. Going through NM should give them pretty better guidelines than
what we ever want to turn up with.

 So long,
Rhonda