On 04/05/2010 03:48 AM, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
On Mon, 05 Apr 2010 03:33:52 +0200
Tobias Heinlein<[email protected]> wrote:
3) Questions that aren't that important at all and would just be "nice
to know".
[snip]
Examples for these:
5. What is wrong with using $(somecommand) or `somecommand` or $ARCH
inside SRC_URI, DEPEND, etc?
[Devmanual, Caching]
How the heck is this not important? Anyone who doesn't immediately know
the answer to this has absolutely no business touching any ebuild that
might end up being given to someone else.
My concern with these kinds of questions is that there really isn't any
page where we have key gotchas consolidated like "don't execute external
programs in global scope." Sure, it is in the devmanual, and if you
read the whole thing then maybe you might remember that one bit in
particular.
I agree that somebody who doesn't know this particular fact shouldn't be
committing ebuilds. My concern is that we don't really have any way to
make people aware of that particular fact.
Honestly, I think it would be just as effective to simply write up a
single webpage with thou shalt not's, and not make people go hunting all
over the place to figure out the whys. By all means have a link on each
thou shalt not to the reason.
There are lots of people who would be perfectly capable of doing many
developer activities who might not come in knowing about the metadata
cache. They don't need to know the nuts and bolts of how it works, just
what they need to do to avoid problems with it.
In any case, giving hints as to the location of the answer in this kind
of a question seems fine to me. The important thing is that the
candidate dev learn about the potential problem - not that they figure
it out 100% on their own. Still, the socratic method is a good approach
to teaching, so I'm not opposed to the Q&A format of the quiz in
general. We just need to let candidates know that we're there to help
them succeed and the quiz is a tool - the goal isn't to eliminate any
potential contributor who doesn't come to the table knowing as much
about Gentoo as any seasoned dev.
Rich
