[Devel] [issue185] Create a basic "git" training mission

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Sun, 9 Jan 2011, Mike Doherty wrote:

> My thoughts are to follow http://progit.org/book/ fairly closely for a
> 5-step mission:
> 1. Installing Git
> 2. Configuring Git
> 3. Cloning a repository
> 4. Viewing history
> 5. Committing and sharing your commit

At a first glance, I like the structure of that.

> The writing is easy. I've written on git before, and there are plenty of 
> good guides to steal from.

Taking ideas from other tutorials is a perfectly reasonable idea.,

It'd be good, for copyright simplicity, if the text that goes into the 
mission is all originally yours. It's okay to paraphrase other people's 
text, or to be inspired from it! That, or if you build upon a tutorial 
released under GPLv3, or a BSD-type license, that's compatible with our 
license.

> The validation code is going to be the main challenge. I don't know much 
> Python, and I've never worked with Django. I would welcome help with 
> figuring out how to validate the steps, and implementing it.

There's sort of two sides to the validation: Coming up with good, 
validate-able checkpoints, and secondly actually making the code validate 
those properly.

I'd probably suggest taking a look at the diffpatch missions, and making 
sure they make sense to you.

Looking at it now, it's the *most* well-documented Python code in the 
world. You can totally ask questions on the list or IRC.

On the topic of validation, again, I can think of how to validate that the 
user installed git. Tell them type:

$ git --version

And ask for the output. Accept anything that looks plausible. (-:

For "Configuring Git", I'm not sure what to do about that. What 
configuration stuff do you want to cover?

For "Cloning a repository" and "Viewing history", if we make a git 
repository that has a plot, kind of like the Subversion mission, then we 
can keep the checking work simple.

-- Asheesh.

-- 
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what
you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
 		-- Mark Twain