martin f krafft wrote:
also sprach Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> [2005.03.15.0015 +0100]:I am not.But in any case, you really shouldn't be offended when people suggest you follow the same path they did.
Well, it sure sounds like you are from where I sit. Maybe you should try to communicate better? :-P
The question is whether we want people helping out, or people spending their resources to figure out where to start.
Learning how to work on things takes a lot of time, that's not something that can be changed. It took me years to get to the point where I knew enough about how things worked to start hacking on the testing scripts, eg.
But that said, working on *on what problem to start* is something we could probably fairly easily simplify. I just want to stress there isn't a magic bullet here, clicheed as that is.
Mentoring *is* the way to go. However, I think it should be the mentors selecting the mentees, not the other way around.
It has to be a bit of both -- we're a volunteer project, and you can't just grab people off the street and make them work for you. Well, you can: as long as they *volunteer* to be grabbed off the street -- and my impression is there are a reasonable number of Debian people who'd *love* to be grabbed off the street and told, "hey, fix this for me!"
And in order to be able to identify promising mentees, they need the have a certain level of knowledge already.
OTOH, one thing about mentoring and apprenticeships is that it's probably important to be able to deal with people who turn out not to have the knowledge/interest/aptitude for the role, and just let them move on with no hard feelings. It's probably better to accept a few more people who turn out unsuitable, than to skip working with someone who doesn't fit the original criteria perfectly but turns out motivated and flexible.
I think the "volunteering and selection" process is probably a pretty good way to approach this.
Cheers, aj