[OH-Dev] Mission Assumptions

[Grant Bowman]

On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Asheesh Laroia <lists at asheesh.org> wrote:
> Excerpts from Grant Bowman's message of Sun May 13 14:43:51 -0400 2012:
>> I have been having a problem with a mission that Asheesh asked me to look at.
>>
>> https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue429
>
> Yeah, you ran into a pretty bad bug. We definitely don't consider that
> buggy behavior to be 'right'!

IMHO, the most important bug is the problem the developers of these
missions have had accepting a problem exists. That seems to have been
fixed. :-)

> What error messages did you get specifically? We're committed to making
> the training missions easy for newcomers, and that includes providing
> helpful error messages for all sorts of likely mistakes.

They were both short. Since I can't reproduce the problem now I guess
it's academic.

> [...]
> With the fix to issue429 deployed, would you give the svn mission
> a fresh run-through, and make sure it's working properly for you as well?

It works just fine now, thanks for all the hard work weeding out this
nasty bug. Some bugs are far easier to fix than others, for sure. End
to end testing such as issue732 is good, helping users understand they
are not crazy when reporting problems as I felt. Things like
additional logging can help catch problems as they happen too.

> I hope that explains things! Thanks for the testing, and your patience.
>
> -- Asheesh.

I'm very excited about this model. More automated hand holding type
exercises like this one for svn can help many more people climb the
long learning curves to contribute productively. RTFM can feel like
such a long, boring process as users are getting more accustomed to
more interactive, social ways of learning like youtube videos and
such.

[rant]
IRC is such a fantastic tool but IRC clients have not kept up with the
expectations of "simple end users" over the years. I was working with
dreamfish.com to patch http://qwebirc.org to help facilitate
interactive participation by those scared of existing IRC clients.
Maybe we I can post another project for that. I was talking about
qwebirc with Alan Bell at uds.ubuntu.com about gatewaying IRC to the
etherpad chat sessions for UDS, allowing a similar audience access to
real IRC. Perhaps my work with plugins for supybot.com can provide a
solution for doing gateways in both directions. Unfortunately the
three main developers seem to have abandoned the website after making
a mess of the APIs I was using to write plugins, choosing to use fancy
Python decerator features in unintuitive ways.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/supybot/
[/rant]

Grant