[OH-Dev] Training missions: is a realistic plot okay?

[Karen Rustad]

Do it! Friendly copy is the important thing, whether specific or general.

-- Karen

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 7:58 AM, Asheesh Laroia <asheesh at asheesh.org> wrote:
> I'm thinking of adding more training missions that are realistic tutorials,
> rather than whimsical plots.
>
> For context -- I'm sitting here at Wikimania, helping a Mozillian with some
> Debian/Ubuntu packaging work, and teaching him how to use "quilt". It turns
> out that there's a super-bitesize bug in a package called 'arduino', and
> that it can be used as part of tutorials on:
>
> * testing packages to make sure that bugs are still present
>
> * rebuilding Debian packages from source
>
> * using 'quilt' to create patches to fix bugs in Debian packages
>
> (This is the bug link:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/arduino/+bug/998952 )
>
> There are quite a few places in this process that it's easy to get lost!
> That suggests to me that the the 'training mission' format of having the
> website verify your work periodically is still quite appropriate.
>
> So here's the question: What if I add one or two (or three?) training
> missions around .deb packaging that have realistic plots, involving actual
> user-facing bugs in older versions of packages, rather than the whimsical
> sort of thing we added like the 'cookbook' setup for the "diff/patch"
> mission?
>
> It seems sensible to me, and I know the training missions were originally my
> idea, so arguably I can just be bold and add these new missions, but I
> thought I'd check to see what others think first.
>
> (It also seems quite nice to have a reasonably-large collection of these,
> and then we can let people try out the process of contributing to a project
> through a simulation.)
>
> I'm also attaching my very skechy 1;5Cnotes from what I watched him do, just
> so they're somewhere reasonable.
>
> Yours truly,
>
> -- Asheesh.
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