On Thu, 29 Nov 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Tom Peters wrote:
>
> > Applying this to objectives too is new for me. Of course there must be
> > some way to move people from preparing for the old objectives to the new
> > ones, but I think having these experimental objectives as a method
> > requires further thought and discussion. Or has this already taken place
> > (I have been mostly offline recently and not followed much traffic)?
> >
> Well, this kind of addresses a gray area. The Objective is generic,
> addressing "boot loaders" (or at least it should be!). The technical
> detail covered beneath the objective does have a range of topics, both of
> which could be LILO and GRUB (and god knows what all else). GRUB is
> becoming pretty widespread being loaded as default by the major
> distributions. I don't beleive including it now, even if just for
> statistical analysis is a problem. We know that it's weights that
> determine how many items for an objective are included, so, even if GRUB
> is mentioned in the objective to describe the "boot loader" tasks, it may
> not make (much) an impact on the actual exams.
The issue was about the possibility to add experimental objectives,
but not test for them, even less count them in scoring. Although it does
solve the problem of how to have people prepared for the new exams and new
content the day that it comes out, I am not convinced this is a good
solution.
The fact that it will not have much impact if you add it and not change
the weights should not be mis-interpreted: this would happen in any number
of objectives, which together changes the landscape of our program. Also
I would hate to keep answering questions (like people are already
posing) when they notice that some things are not covered in the exams.
> I have no problems including GRUB. It isn't much different than deciding
> that iptables should be included by default WITH ipchains. It's obvious
> that iptables surpasses ipchain's quality, but not all distributions focus
> on iptables solutions, yet we are still going to cover both, because both
> are widely used...
On specific issues like these I suggest to apply my rule of thumb and
review what is actually in current default use in major distros. Majority
wins. It may be different from what it was some months ago.
Also I would caution against these 2 things:
1) predict the future ("everybody will be using this by the time our exams
come out")
2) set the policy ("everybody should be using this"): we should follow
existing policies.
IMNSHO LPI should be following current best standard practices, as we
learn from our surveys; not being ahead of it.
--
Tom Peters
Director of the Board & Exam Development Specialist,
Linux Professional Institute
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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