This site is an archive; learn more about 8 years of OpenHatch.

[OH-Dev] Giving the "tar" mission more of a plot

Asheesh Laroia asheesh at asheesh.org
Mon Jan 2 17:49:17 UTC 2012


Hey all,

https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue637 points out that the tar mission is 
without a plot.

The basics
----------

The learning objective of the tar mission that people gain familiarity 
with the 'tar' tool and its basic use in extracting and creating archives.

The activity of the mission is downloading file(s) and passing them 
through 'tar'.

We assess the user by checking the files, as processed by tar and uploaded 
to the user.

Proposed "plot"
---------------

I propose that the tar mission tell you:

"You have been nominated release manager for the project called 
helloproject. The other developers have created a tarball that contains 
the first version of the project! Your job is to take their tarball, fix 
it up to comply with standard naming conventions, and then upload it 
back."

(Rationale: All the good "plots" we have so far have some social element 
to them. For Git and Subversion, it's easy to imagine social use cases. 
For tar, this is the best I could come up with.)

The tar file will have just one problem: the wrapper directory will be 
called "helloproject" and it should be called "helloproject-0.1", so we 
will ask you to rename it.

Upside: This means that we'll simplify the mission a little bit -- you'll 
just download one tarball at the start. You'll extract it, and then work 
with the contents, rename the wrapper directory, then re-upload it.

Downside: It makes the mission more strictly linear -- you will have to do 
the extraction part before you do the creation part.

Feedback requested
------------------

If anyone has any thoughts on if you do/don't like this, say so on this 
thread. I'll wait a few days before submitting patches for these 
changes to the training mission.

-- Asheesh.


More information about the Devel mailing list