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

[Asheesh Laroia]

Excerpts from Jessica McKellar's message of Sat Jan 07 13:37:27 -0500 2012:
> > "You have been nominated release manager for the project called helloproject.
> 
> Some people aren't going to know what a release manager is, or what
> naming conventions are. These could be explained, but naming
> conventions aren't very exciting to explain.
> 
> Maybe the fact that ghello-0.4 doesn't have particularly interesting
> content is making it hard to come up with ideas. To brainstorm briefly
> about a plot on sharing and changing content via tarballs, with
> potentially totally different content from what we have now:
> 
> - You could be updating a tarball containing family tree information
> because someone was born recently
> - You could be adding content to a group project for school or work
> - You could receive and send content to a pen pal (computer pal?) via tarball
> - You could be a teacher grading homework that your students have
> uploaded as tarballs
> 
> What do you think? Anyone have other brainstorming material?

I kind of like the idea that we're teaching people how to be a release
manager, but on the other hand, there might be something more fun to do
with a tar file.

I really do like that we teach people to use "wrapper directories" -- John
Stumpo and I were, when we were coming up with the plot line for this initially,
were railing against people who post tar/zip files on forums that don't
understand this piece of open source culture.

But we can impose that constraint on people even in a different example. (-:

I do like the pen-pals-sending-files via tarball one a lot!

We could actually stick to the recipes example some more. Something like:

Your friend has sent you a tar file that contains their favorite recipes.
What is their favorite kind of breakfast food? (The answer can be sitting
inside a README file, for example, and be one of: pancakes/waffles/etc.)

The question for me is, what do we ask you to send back? It could just be
a personal essay... or a collection of recipes... or ...?

-- Asheesh.