Re: Various things
Hello
On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 10:12:02AM -0300, Margarita Manterola wrote:
> On 7/21/05, Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org> wrote:
>
> > > 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
> > feel it's beneath them? Or is it incompetent applicants who feel
> > intimidated by all the hard concepts to look up?
>
> I think it's mainly people who know, or can search and then produce
> the answers, but feel that they are wasting their time on that.
If you do not know the answer it will of course take so much time to
learn first.
> Completing the 4 templates takes many many hours, hours that could be
> spent bugfixing, packaging, writing code, etc.
Yes, ANY checks will take time from other things.
> In my case, my P&P questions came in the middle of a BSP, I promptly
> stopped fixing bugs to answer these questions. In the end, I stole
> something like 12 hours of the BSP to answer P&P questions... Isn't
> that like a big big waste?
No it is not. If you had known the answers you had answerd this mail in
less than say 30 minutes. As you did not (or was unsure enough to check)
you had to learn. Do not take this personally. Maybe you knew but wanted
to double-check. It is fully acceptable but will of course take some time.
> > 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.
>
> The most interesting and most useful part of the templates is the last
> one, where you are actually asked to DO things, like fix an RC bug,
> write a missing manpage, etc. Those are much more useful and
> interesting things. I think it would be nice to have more tasks and
> less write-ups.
I can agree on this that it is more interesting to "do do actual things"
but it is very important that all Debian developers know the basic
policy and procedures. What would happen if we accept people after
making some checks that the person can patch packages or write manual
pages without checking if they know anything about Debian policy or
what the procedures are?
We would have many more developers, sure, but how many
non policy-compliant packages would we have, or how many non-free
stuff would be uploaded to main, or how many packages would be
NMU:ed for wrong purposes, or ... etc.
I assume that you know that all Debian Developers have the possibility
to gain root access to any Debian systems around the world that
have their packages installed (hint postinst)?
That is something that you should take serious.
Regards,
// Ola
> --
> Besos,
> Marga
>
>
--
--------------------- Ola Lundqvist ---------------------------
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