Re: Various things
Hello
I'll respond to this matter on this list as the discussion got
a bit too long on debian-devel...
I have been an AM for some time. Had made a pause now though becuase of
lack of time to handle applicants. I would not have more time if
it was simpler questions to check anyway.
I have to agree with you. I do not really see the problem.
On Thu, Jul 21, 2005 at 09:34:58PM -0500, Peter Samuelson wrote:
>
> [followups to d-newmaint please]
>
> [Matthew Palmer]
> > Making NM more of a mentoring+monitoring thing, instead of The Essay
> > Test From Hell, would be a Great Thing. It appears that other AMs
> > aren't entirely against the idea, either.
>
> People keep complaining about the Essay Test from Hell, but I guess I
> still don't quite see the problem. Who is it that doesn't like it? Is
> it AMs that feel it's too much work on top of their other duties to get
> to know an applicant's skill level? Is it the competent applicants who
We have quite a lot AM:s and other methods take as much time if they
should in any way give proper results.
> feel it's beneath them? Or is it incompetent applicants who feel
> intimidated by all the hard concepts to look up?
This should never be a problem.
> I was rather looking forward to the ETfH part, once I qualify for NM in
> the first place, which is obviously still well in the future. Those
> templates (at least as of a long time ago when I perused them) cover
> such a wide range of material that demonstrating one's knowledge of
> everything by one's direct actions would take *forever*. Sure, it's
Agree!
> possible to cheat by cutting/pasting answers from someone else (or from
> google), but really it's possible to cheat on *any* NM material that
> isn't conducted via live chat.[1]
Agree.
> I guess I'm not actually opposed to the idea of making people *do* all
> the things they are currently only *asked* about - I am just curious
> about who is clamoring for this, and why.
There are different ways of doing tests, and they cover different areas.
What I think the complaint is really about is that the Policy and
procedures is covered in a good way by the templates (theory part) but
the tasks and skills was not. This has been solved by the requirement
of having at least one well maintained package in Debian before beeing
accepted.
I also think that some people do not think that the policy part is that
very important because "real work is what matters". This true in some
extent but my opinion is that policy parts is the important parts in
becoming a maintainer or not. If you are a good maintainer that is a
good thing. It is more important for packages that do not have an
upstream author anymore and for really hard packages. But for most
packages the work is really trivial and therefore the policy things
is the most important.
Regards,
// Ola
> [1] Having a T&S "exam" conducted over, say, IRC privmsg, is something
> I'd be more than willing to go through, because that'd be a *really
> good* way to get a feel for how well I know my stuff. But I
> understand it would be a huge time sink for the AM, compared to the
> alternatives.
--
--------------------- Ola Lundqvist ---------------------------
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