Re: What do you want to learn?
Hi everyone :)
So, the website is nearing mostly-completion (don't worry, I promise to let
everyone know when I finally finish!), and I was thinking a few
things..
Can you please remind us of where the website is, when you are finished
with it.
I wonder if we could put the website address into the signature of
emails from the mailing list, once the website is done, or at least into
whatever the list sends to someone who has just subscribed. Then people
who subscribe to the list will immediately learn about the website even
when others might have stopped talking about it.
Before we can begin on larger projects (working with schools, children,
etc.) we need to get a strong infrastructure going. Part of this is
acclimating the women here with Debian and getting them more involved. Many
of the people here, as far as I know, are at varying levels of expertise
with the system.
It would be interesting and useful to do a little survey of people's
current and desired involvement with debian. That way we would know
what people want most to learn about. My current interest is in working
out how to package the two really simple things I just submitted an ITP
for (ITP = Intend To Package and it means I want to turn those programs
into new debian packages - if you wait for long enough they may even
actually appear...). This will quite possibly occupy me for some time -
does anyone else get *really* confused by the instructions in the New
Maintainer's Guide and/or the Developers Reference - all that
terminology! For people who don't know what I'm referring to, these
documents can be found in the developers corner, at:
http://www.debian.org/devel/. Stuff there is in general interesting,
but don't be put off if you don't understand it all yet because you're
certainly not the only one :)
As I understand it, others are interested in learning about writing
documentation. There are probably other things other people would like
to learn how to do.
I thought Pia's idea that we maintain packages with our name attached was a
very interesting idea. If I'm extrapolating correctly, the idea is to have
something like a co-maintenance team. Many large packages (or large groups
of packages) within Debian are maintained by teams of people. An example,
in my case, is LyX which I co-maintain with one other person (Hi Rob!).
Larger examples are the Gnome team, whose project is hosted on alioth.
Since our website is hosted on alioth already, we would have another
mailing list available for use if we wanted to maintain packages under a
Debian Women umbrella. We also have this mailing list available, but if we
were to do something like this, bug reports would be sent to the list (a la
debian-boot@lists.debian.org). While this may be cool for a few reasons,
depending on what happens, it could also potentially cause unwanted list
traffic for some subscribers.
I'd be inclined to suggest a seperate list for that, since such traffic
might not be wanted by everyone. Specifically, if someone joined the
list and they were just starting to learn about debian, she/he might be
put off by a blizzard of technical email, if the timing was wrong.
For people just learning the way things work, co- or team-maintenance can
teach you quite a lot and give you time to become comfortable with your
skills. Indeed, this is the preferred method for many people, and it helps
you get to know other developers and wannabe developers, as well as giving
you the opportunity to figure out who you work best with and which projects
are more interesting to you.
Sounds good to me :) I would be interested in that.
In order to do this, we may need to cover some basics. Some of these
include manipulation of the Debian bug tracking system (BTS), packaging
techniques, what ITP's, ITA's, RFA's, RFH's are, and things of that nature.
Also, if there will be co-maintenance happening, some people will need to
learn about revision control systems, which are used in many distributed
projects in order to keep track of changes. There are a lot of them out
there and they tend to be sort of involved, but they are essential for
working in groups. Documentation techniques should probably be covered as
well, for those of you who wish to go down that path. Likewise for
translations.
All sounds good to me.
I personally tend to learn better when people explain to me, rather than
reading long documents, so I'm generally in favor of tutorials where you
can ask questions. I don't know if the list or IRC is better suited for
this kind of thing -- presumably they could operate in tandem. I'd not want
list members to miss out on IRC discussions, though, and not everyone has
the time or inclination to spend hours on IRC. :)
I don't usually have the time for long hours of irc. I'd personally
probably prefer things to be discussed on the list, though irc is a good
way to discuss a series of relatively fast questions. I think tandem is
good. One possibility would be irc sessions that are decided on in
advance - maybe we could have a weekly discussion at a specific time,
with topics posted in advance. That way people who are interested in
that thing could join in. But it would mean people who knew something
about that thing would need to know they could be there then, and some
would be unavoidably excluded by timezones etc. Of course we could
presumably post the transcripts of the irc sessions later, for those who
missed out to read, if they wanted.
What does anyone else think?
Helen.
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