Sarah Hobbs ha scritto: > What sort of things would be required of the mentor? Would the mentor > need the technical knowledge on how the particular project should work, > or just to know how the community works and how to get things uploaded? > Or both? >
I think that a project so complicated that it needs a precise technical knowledge would require co-operation from upstream, and I would rather be oriented to simple projects at least for now. Unfortunately - I was not quite clear in my previous message - we cannot just let the student choose a blueprint, because apprenticeships have to be proposed and approved at university before students can see them. So we would have to choose 3 or 4 topics, even if no blueprint exists (but I doubt there is an ubuntu need not covered by some blueprint :) ), and then I would have to find a teacher to "sponsor" the projects here. I already talked to a teacher who is very fond of free software, and she said that "the thing is doable". You can't expect much more out of a teacher nowadays :) > Obviously, not all of them will be installed by default, as there is > limited space and such, but it will go into the repository, if the > student has completed the project (and packaging) satisfactorily. Of course, and here I also reply to Aaron, I know that the default installation is quite small and essential, and my expectations don't go beyond inclusion in universe. >> I have three topics in mind, that are likely easy enough for a student, >> but low-priority enough that they still are lacking functionality in >> ubuntu. > > Some of these are upstream projects - but there's no reason you could > not ask the same thing of upstream. >> Thanks and bye >> Well, these are just examples. Maybe there are more urgent applications, I went here to ask more than to tell, and would like to identify, for the first start, something that is useful to all ubuntu users, and improves the "beginner" user experience with ubuntu. I choose ubuntu instead of upstream mainly for two reasons: 1. when proposing apprenticeships in free software here at university, the strong argument in favour of them should be that a students learns the "new" way to work which is typical of free software: very strong support tools, and a huge community. There, you have to learn both to write good code, because other people _will_ read it (this is really different from small software companies here in Italy that even tell you not to waste time documenting code), and to interact and cooperate with other people. Often, we know, being accepted as a well-behaved and cooperative human being is more important than being a coding-machine. Now ubuntu has the best supporting tool ever seen (consider the combination of launchpad and dev-tools), and the larger and more friendly community (in particular, MOTUs _never_ refuse an explanation on IRC :) ). In my opinion there's no better place where to learn how to develop free software at the moment. 2. I thought upstream wouldn't be such a good idea for certain things, such as ADSL support, because in principle, as I said above, I wanted to start with projects that would improve the "new user experience" in ubuntu. Being this distribution the most popular at the moment, many users get disappointed by a free operating system and environment when they discover that they are not able to do simple tasks such as connect and disconnect to their pay-per-time ADSL in one click, for example. I often try to convince people to give ubuntu a try, this can have a good or a bad end, depending on how many of these missing feature the new user needs. This is bad publicity, and I would like to improve the situation directly in the distribution. OpenSuse won't need ADSL support for example, since they had ADSL tools from the beginning, so going upstream is less urgent than going ubuntu in my opinion. For now, I don't think we have much time. We might try to propose just one project, and see what happens. The human backup specification can be improved by adding on-the-fly backups, and, if time remains to the implementor, a gnome-vfs backend to access data on cds using the powerful DAR features to extract files. If you can think of other applications, maybe more urgent or easier, just tell me. I will contact hubackup developers directly in the meantime (don't know if they are reading this mailing list). Vincenzo -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
