On 16/03/13 at 15:31 +0100, Serafeim Zanikolas wrote: > On Sat, Mar 16, 2013 at 11:21:05AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote [edited]: > > But asking students to contribute to Debian during university projects is > > quite > > difficult (I have thought about it numerous times, but never found a > > good-enough idea). it would be interesting to share feedback on that, to > > identify and suppress potential blockers. > > If you refer to university students in some software-related discipline:
(yes) > have > you considered assignments for the preparation of patches for wishlist bugs in > native and pseudo-packages (eg. infra-related sw projects)? YMMV, but due to the way student projects are organized in France, the following problems are often blockers: - Tasks are not long enough. Typically, what you need is something that would take an experienced DD about 40 hours (for part-time projects with groups of 2 to 4 students). Many of tasks are much smaller than that, and you can't just aggregate several tasks, because then, the project loses interest in terms of "project management". - I don't know the software, and there's no one willing to act as backup-mentor on the Debian side, in case I cannot answer the students' question. - (for infrastructure) setting up a development instance is not documented, impossible, or extremely difficult. - The amount of learning required to be able to do the project, compared to the amount of work to do, is too high. - The project is not motivating enough for the students (it does not result in exposing the students to sufficiently-interesting technologies, for example). Have others thought about that/tried to organize such university projects? Lucas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130316152803.ga24...@xanadu.blop.info
