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Re: to DPL candidates: getting new people to Debian



On 16/03/13 at 15:31 +0100, Serafeim Zanikolas wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 11:21:05AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]:
> > But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is quite
> > difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a
> > good-enough idea).  it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to
> > identify and suppress potential blockers.
> 
> If you refer to university students in some software-related discipline:

(yes)

> have
> you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in
> native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)?

YMMV, but due to the way student projects are organized in France, the
following problems are often blockers:

- Tasks are not long enough. Typically, what you need is something that
  would take an experienced DD about 40 hours (for part-time projects
  with groups of 2 to 4 students). Many of tasks are much
  smaller than that, and you can't just aggregate several tasks, because
  then, the project loses interest in terms of "project management".

- I don't know the software, and there's no one willing to act as
  backup-mentor on the Debian side, in case I cannot answer the
  students' question.

- (for infrastructure) setting up a development instance is not
  documented, impossible, or extremely difficult.

- The amount of learning required to be able to do the project, compared
  to the amount of work to do, is too high.

- The project is not motivating enough for the students (it does not
  result in exposing the students to sufficiently-interesting
  technologies, for example).

Have others thought about that/tried to organize such university
projects?

Lucas


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