Re: FYI: QA uploads primer

[Stefanos Harhalakis <v13@v13.gr>]

On Tuesday 16 June 2009, Sandro Tosi wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 00:53, Serafeim Zanikolas<serzan@hellug.gr> wrote:
> > There's a tradeoff: encouraging potential new contributors (in the hope
> > that
>
> and do you think you're in position to take this tradeoff? I don't think
> so.
>
> > they'll eventually read all the docs) at the cost of initially
> > lower-quality RFS requests,
>
> and who will pay this price? you don't for sure, but the sponsors!! Do
> you really want to make them more upset than by current low quality
> RFSes (there are exceptions, of course)?

You're basing your reasoning on the following assumptions:
a) Everyone should read all guides before attempting to make a package
b) Not providing very-easy to follow instructions will result in better 
packaging

which most probably are both wrong. We (humans) tend to focus on the things 
that we're currently interested in and bypass everything unrelated. To better 
understand this, consider programming in C: You're somehow proposing that one 
should first read ISO/IEC 9899:1999 before writing C programs but that's not 
how it works. You first write a 'hello world' program, not knowing what 
"#include" does and you learn in the way (most probably following the same 
learning curve everyone else did). Of course you need to look at the C spec to 
claim that you understand C in depth (you did... didn't you?) and in order to 
understand why

int n=1; int main() { n=n; printf("%d", n); } 

will not output '1', or what:

int main() ??< int n=1??!2; ??>

means.

You have to accept the fact that all prospective maintainers need a starting 
point and they need to make a package (most probably) from scratch as easy as 
possible. This is the point where someone will start reading the policy etc 
and actually understand what he's reading. Doing that before trying to create 
a package will be 100% abstract and will be mostly rejected by his brain.

Other words that you may find interesting are: reference, guide, howto, 
tutorial, etc... As you already know, they describe materials that help people 
learn things like "debian packaging". If you sort them properly (as in "what 
to read first") you'll get something like: tutorial, guide, howto, reference. 
What Serafeim proposed (and did) was an easy to follow tutorial. The well-
written n-m-g would come next.