Re: Debian and professional certifications

[Matthew R. Dempsky]

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 07:26:50AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> Ottavio Caruso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> Well, that's a bit offensive.

Yeah, using stupid, obviously bogus addresses is only acceptable in the 
Mail-Followup-To field:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2006/04/msg00118.html


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Re: Debian and professional certifications

[Gunnar Wolf]

Aníbal Monsalve Salazar dijo [Tue, May 02, 2006 at 04:40:49PM +1000]:
> On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 07:27:13AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
> >By the way, you could view debian participation as a sort of
> >professional certification. Some of the tasks have quite
> >detailed and testing requirements...
> 
> So, the NM process could then be renamed "Debian Professional
> Certification".

If you wish to certify somebody as willing to join endless flamewars,
to idle around in IRC and devote his time to volunteer work, yes, it
might - Often, certifications care about the individual and not about
its interactions with any group, but merely take a snapshot on their
proficiency on a limited set of practical abilities at a given point
in time (remember that most certifications will expire sooner than
later). 

Greetings,

-- 
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Re: Debian and professional certifications

[Aníbal Monsalve Salazar]

On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 07:27:13AM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
>By the way, you could view debian participation as a sort of
>professional certification. Some of the tasks have quite
>detailed and testing requirements...

So, the NM process could then be renamed "Debian Professional
Certification".

Aníbal Monsalve Salazar
-- 
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Re: Debian and professional certifications

[MJ Ray]

Ottavio Caruso <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Well, that's a bit offensive.

> 1) Is there a specific Debian policy about
> professional certifications?

Not as far as I know.

> If not so, what's your personal opinion? Useful,
> useless, good, evil?

Useless, mostly evil.

> 2) What about LPI? I've seen they recommend training
> centres in the UK which are definitely Microsoft-only.
> Surely a mistake or are these people interested in
> money only?

Their GPL examination system, Xamnet, has been vapour for years.
Draw your own conclusion about how much they promote freedom!

By the way, you could view debian participation as a sort of
professional certification. Some of the tasks have quite
detailed and testing requirements...

-- 
MJR/slef
Laux nur mia opinio: vidu http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Bv sekvu http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct


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Re: irc.debian.org

[MJ Ray]

Benjamin Seidenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> You may also want to ask some of the DD's who refuse to use freenode
> anymore. [...]

I mostly avoid freenode for years now, because:
- it's verbosity city, from the motd to the wallops
- its bizarre behaviours like NOIDPRIVMSG and +q are confusing
- it ain't nicknamed freesplit for nothing
- some of its bugs have been embarrasing (high traffic mode, anyone?)
- as a result of crude fixes, it's a pain to identify a local server
(/links and /map disabled, web site seems to lag, page undated)
- the foundation behind it seems opaque and questioning that got
several people called trolls and banned
- their long-term aim doesn't require running a compatible IRC
environment (see http://freenode.net/freenode_and_irc.shtml )
- their long-term aim used to be to progress beyond mere IRC,
develop a corridor-based discussion model with a distributed MUD
interface and be picked up by a UFO following a comet, or something
http://web.archive.org/web/20010305222529/http://openprojects.net/corridors.shtml

It would be good to move irc.debian.org to fellow SPI project OFTC.

What's the status?

-- 
MJR/slef
Laux nur mia opinio: vidu http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Bv sekvu http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct


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Re: irc.debian.org

[Manoj Srivastava]

Hi,

I was pretty neutral about whether we should pull
 irc.debian.org away from freenode,  but a recent incident makes me
 wonder how developer friendly freenode is anymore.

After some discussion earlier in the day about music players,
 ipods, and  free software one can flash on ipods, I decided to clean
 up my variant of the Green5 rockbox theme and presented screenshots
 on [EMAIL PROTECTED]

The images are still at
 http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/dump_060502-005528.bmp 
 http://people.debian.org/~srivasta/dump_060502-005659.bmp
   fairly innocuous, as you can see.

I was immediately klined from freenode, no if, and, or buts --
 apparently on the grounds that Spam is not tolerated. Why screenshots
 of free software players are Spam on a debian development channel is
 beyond me -- but obviously  this is not a good thing to happen on a
 project channel.

OFTC seem to not have such a draconian policy, I suggest we
 move all Debian channels off freenode.

I am CC'ing the freenode staff on this message, so they do not
 get blind sided.

manoj
-- 
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Manoj Srivastava   <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  
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[stanley jenkins]

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Re: Debian and professional certifications

[Gustavo Noronha Silva]

Em Dom, 2006-04-30 às 13:37 -0300, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (faw)
escreveu:
> > Debian is a volunteer project and has neither the inclination or
> > capability to run professional certifications, and is not involved or
> > partnering with any other organization to provide such. This does not
> > prevent other interested parties from providing such certification, but
> > Debian itself has no part in them.
> >
> > I have personally no opinion about professional certification.
> 
>   Christoph Lameter [1]used to be Debian representative with
> LPI. I don't know if I misunderstood, but I always thought that
> Debian, in some way, supports (or recommends) LPI tests/exams as a
> way to get a Professional Certification that involves Debian
> knowledge.

I don't see it this way, and I personally do not support Professional
Certification, be it LPI or any other. I would not like to see Debian
supporting them either.

See you,

-- 
Gustavo Noronha Silva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://people.debian.org/~kov/


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Re: irc.debian.org

[Joerg Jaspert]

On 10641 March 1977, Bernhard R. Link wrote:

> - network stability: oftc annoys with many netsplits lately. This might
>   be temporary, but in the last month it was extreme.

No, some were there, but not more than in Feenode.

> - nickserv/chanserv services differ. I'm receiving the expression
>   freenodes are more sophisticated, but that might just be usage.

What are you missing, there is Chanserv/nickserv too?

-- 
bye Joerg
 Joey, provide a patch then.


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Re: summer of code: what's next?

[Baruch Even]

Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 08:49:17PM +0100, Baruch Even wrote:
> 
>>>AFAIK the period for proposals is over.
>>
>>The time to submit proposals is just now starting, it starts on 1st of
>>May 2006 according to the SoC Student FAQ.
> 
> 
> I was talking from the Debian point of view: we have no more time to add
> new proposals to the Wiki page. Did I get it wrong?


You can add projects, but the students need to submit proposals now, I
guess in the next couple of days would be the last time to do so, after
that the students will stop looking for new projects.

Ofcourse, you can collect information as a Todo list or for the next
year SoC.


>>I think that a week or so from now the time for applications will be
>>over and by 22nd of May all decisions on which projects are to be
>>accepted or rejected.
> 
> 
> Ok, this is the point I'am mainly concerned about. Thus here is a bunch
> of question: do we, as Debian, have a maximum amount of project we can
> accept or similar? Can we accept as many as we wish or not? Who does
> decide the limit? In case is there such a limit, how do we internally
> decide which projects we will accept?


I assume there is some sort of a limit, there are about 80 organizations
that offer projects and about 400 to 500 positions for student projects.
So I expect to have about 6 projects.

I assume the limit will be imposed by Google to distribute projects
rather evenly among projects, assuming all will have qualified students
interested.

The project offers will need to be graded by the mentor(s), I'm not sure
about the process of this yet.


Baruch


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Re: summer of code: what's next?

[Baruch Even]

Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 05:37:21PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> 
>>As has been mentioned on the -project and -private lists, Debian has
>>joined the Google Summer of Code programme, and project ideas are being
>>collected on the wiki [1]. Our participation is being administered
>>by Baruch Even, whom you should contact if the idea of spending some
>>of Google's money on improving Debian and giving a student some free
>>software experience sounds like a good idea to you.
> 
> 
> AFAIK the period for proposals is over.

The time to submit proposals is just now starting, it starts on 1st of
May 2006 according to the SoC Student FAQ.

> Baruch, could you please summarize the next steps for the Debian people
> who proposed projects?

I actually don't know much more than there is in the Mentors FAQ
http://code.google.com/soc/mentorfaq.html

The gist of it is that students now need to submit proposals and the
mentors can and should review the proposals and mark them. As of now
2006-05-01 20:46 UTC+0100 there are no applications in the queue.

I think that a week or so from now the time for applications will be
over and by 22nd of May all decisions on which projects are to be
accepted or rejected.

> Some people mailed me about the proposal I made, I answered about
> clarification on the proposal, but I frankly do not know what should
> happen next? I guess other people are in the very same position. A
> public answer could help all of us :-)

If they are interested they should write a proposal and submit it in the
Google SoC site, there is a student FAQ for them at
http://code.google.com/soc/studentfaq.html

To be frank, I'm new to this as well so I don't have all the answers,
I'll try to research it more and come back with more details if/when I
have them.

Baruch


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Re: summer of code: what's next?

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 08:49:17PM +0100, Baruch Even wrote:
> > AFAIK the period for proposals is over.
> The time to submit proposals is just now starting, it starts on 1st of
> May 2006 according to the SoC Student FAQ.

I was talking from the Debian point of view: we have no more time to add
new proposals to the Wiki page. Did I get it wrong?

> I think that a week or so from now the time for applications will be
> over and by 22nd of May all decisions on which projects are to be
> accepted or rejected.

Ok, this is the point I'am mainly concerned about. Thus here is a bunch
of question: do we, as Debian, have a maximum amount of project we can
accept or similar? Can we accept as many as we wish or not? Who does
decide the limit? In case is there such a limit, how do we internally
decide which projects we will accept?

> To be frank, I'm new to this as well so I don't have all the answers,
> I'll try to research it more and come back with more details if/when I
> have them.

To be even more frank: even if I registered as a mentor, I haven't yet
had the time to look at the FAQ (it's huge!), thus I asked hoping
someone else did :) So, many thanks for your time!

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
[EMAIL PROTECTED],debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-


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summer of code: what's next?

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2006 at 05:37:21PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> As has been mentioned on the -project and -private lists, Debian has
> joined the Google Summer of Code programme, and project ideas are being
> collected on the wiki [1]. Our participation is being administered
> by Baruch Even, whom you should contact if the idea of spending some
> of Google's money on improving Debian and giving a student some free
> software experience sounds like a good idea to you.

AFAIK the period for proposals is over.

Baruch, could you please summarize the next steps for the Debian people
who proposed projects?

Some people mailed me about the proposal I made, I answered about
clarification on the proposal, but I frankly do not know what should
happen next? I guess other people are in the very same position. A
public answer could help all of us :-)

TIA,
Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy
[EMAIL PROTECTED],debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
If there's any real truth it's that the entire multidimensional infinity
of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. -!-


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Re: About terminology for stable/testing/unstable

[Pierre Habouzit]

Le Lun 1 Mai 2006 12:18, Frans Pop a écrit :
> One problem with branches is that you should also have a "trunk"
> (that which you branched away from), or at least a "root".
> Talking about the "stable branch" does not seem quite right to me;
> using "branch" for testing and unstable is quite natural, but then it
> fails as a general term.

well, technically, stable is at some point branched from testing, that 
is a cherry-pick of unstable. So this terminology is not that far 
fetched either. « The stable branch » of debian is a good name. Though, 
I'm not sure it's true for testing and unstable. and is IMHO completely 
absurd for experimental.
-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O[EMAIL PROTECTED]
OOOhttp://www.madism.org


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Re: About terminology for stable/testing/unstable

[Anthony Towns]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 12:18:38PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> I wanted to suggest to make more general use of the term suite.
> However, while writing this I (re)discover that there is a difference 
> between "suite" and "suit" [1]. Until now I'd linked the term "suite" as 
> used in Debian with "suit" as in the four suits in a deck of cards (with 
> oldstable, stable, testing and unstable making up the distribution; add 
> experimental as the joker).

  Suite \Suite\, n. [F. See {Suit}, n.]
 2. A connected series or succession of objects; a number of
things used or clessed together; a set; as, a suite of
rooms; a suite of minerals. See {Suit}, n., 6.

The collection of packages makes up a suite. That's the theory anyway afaik.

Cheers,
aj


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Re: irc.debian.org

[Guilherme de S. Pastore]

Em Dom, 2006-04-30 às 19:34 +0100, Steve McIntyre escreveu:
> I've heard it suggested by a variety of people that we should move the
> official irc.debian.org alias away from freenode to oftc. I can see
> that more and more of my own Debian IRC discussions are on oftc, to
> the extent that I'm (currently) not on any freenode channels at
> all.
> 
> On another front, oftc is also a sister org under the SPI
> umbrella.
> 
> Thoughts?

Please, do it!

-- 
Guilherme de S. Pastore (fatalerror)


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Re: About terminology for stable/testing/unstable

[Kevin Mark]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 10:10:20AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> A recent discussion popped up in the French l10n mailing list
> (http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2006/04/msg00539.html, in
> French) about the terminology to use for writing documentation and
> making reference to stable/testing/unstable in various parts of our
> documentation/web site and even packages (D-I for instance).
> 
Hi Christian,
I like the terms you used but I have a comment.  I think of the output
of Debian in two terms: fixed and changing. Sarge is a fixed product
that is released and contains a fixed suite of software (with the
exception of point releases) and exists for a fixed time and 'streams'
of software, where if you 'follow' stable,testing and unstable, you will
get a continuous stream of changing software packages and you can say I
am running 'unstable' but need to clarify this by saying that I have
packages from the unstable stream that were released between $THIS_DATE
and $THAT_DATE or between $THIS_RELEASE and $THIS_RELEASE+1 because
unstable does not exists for a fixed date like releases, it always
exists, and changes(at least more recent release cycles).
cheers,
Kev
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Re: irc.debian.org

[Bernhard R. Link]

* Steve McIntyre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [060430 20:35]:
> I've heard it suggested by a variety of people that we should move the
> official irc.debian.org alias away from freenode to oftc. I can see
> that more and more of my own Debian IRC discussions are on oftc, to
> the extent that I'm (currently) not on any freenode channels at
> all.

While I don't really have a strong opinion, as my config just points to
irc.debian.org for the debian channels, I think there are some points
against a move:

- network stability: oftc annoys with many netsplits lately. This might
  be temporary, but in the last month it was extreme.

- nickserv/chanserv services differ. I'm receiving the expression
  freenodes are more sophisticated, but that might just be usage.

Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link


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Re: About terminology for stable/testing/unstable

[Frans Pop]

On Monday 01 May 2006 10:10, Christian Perrier wrote:
> My personal opinion is that we should maybe use "branch" rather than
> "distribution" to avoid that confusion. This is what the French team
> is considering (there are some people who object to this, though).

One problem with branches is that you should also have a "trunk" (that 
which you branched away from), or at least a "root".
Talking about the "stable branch" does not seem quite right to me; using 
"branch" for testing and unstable is quite natural, but then it fails as 
a general term.

I wanted to suggest to make more general use of the term suite.
However, while writing this I (re)discover that there is a difference 
between "suite" and "suit" [1]. Until now I'd linked the term "suite" as 
used in Debian with "suit" as in the four suits in a deck of cards (with 
oldstable, stable, testing and unstable making up the distribution; add 
experimental as the joker).
I do wonder what was intended here originally...

[1] http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/suite
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/suit


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Re: About terminology for stable/testing/unstable

[Andreas Barth]

* Christian Perrier ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [060501 10:10]:
> However, when looking at various original documentation we have in the
> project about this, it appears that some more consistency could be
> achieved. "distribution" is sometimes used (as in
> http://www.debian.org/releases/) but so is "suite" (for instance in
> most code) and sometimes "version"

I mostly read "the stable distribution" as an abbreviation of "the
stable suite of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution". So, it depends a bit
where you are: If you're only having one suite of the distribution in
your hands (perhaps even phyiscally, like a DVD), wording sounds more
correct if you speak about the stable distribution. If you however have
all suites together (like in katie), the term suite seems to suite
better.

Your summary seems to be consistent with these ideas in my mind.


Cheers,
Andi
-- 
  http://home.arcor.de/andreas-barth/


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Re: irc.debian.org

[Don Armstrong]

On Sun, 30 Apr 2006, Joe Smith wrote:
> If the move is done, the FN channels should be kept open and the
> topic should redirect users to OFTC. Then any packages that
> reference the FN channel should be updated.

My point was that the people who really need help just follow
irc.debian.org; the people who are giving the help generally don't
connect directly to irc.debian.org [as they know which network they're
on.]

> Otherwise there would be split between the networks. 

There will always be a split between the networks; there are #debian
channels on most of the major networks.

Switching networks really won't cause the splits to go away; it'll
just change which network the majority of the conversations happen on
in the few cases where that hasn't changed already.


Don Armstrong

-- 
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far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel's labored
effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all
the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting
on it--and is just as likely to succeed.
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Re: About terminology for stable/testing/unstable

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On Mon, 1 May 2006 10:10:20 +0200 Christian Perrier wrote:

> Distribution: used to talk about Debian in general, whichever branch
>   is used
> 
> Branch (or suite): used to talk about stable, testing and unstable
>and explain differences between all of them or the
>ways they are developed 
> 
> Release : used to talk about the successive releases of
>   Debian as a distribution: potato, woody, sargeas
>   well as the release updates
> 
> Version : used when using numerical version numbers (3.1r2, etc..)
> 
> I understand this is somewhat tricky and it may become very easy to
> nitpick about the assumptions I made above but I'd really like to see
> us accept that not everything is easy to understand from an outsider
> point of view, in our terminology.
> 
> Comments welcomed (heh, I subscribed to -project just for this...)

I find the proposed clarifications quite accurate: To test, the
following sentence to makes sense (no word reuse for different
meanings):

when finalizing a branch of the Debian distribution, its internal
codename is used as official release name and a version number is
decided.


 - Jonas

-- 
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* Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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Re: irc.debian.org

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2006 at 07:25:50PM -0300, Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (faw) 
wrote:
> On 04/30/2006 05:46 PM, Frans Pop wrote:
> > On Sunday 30 April 2006 22:32, Paul Johnson wrote:
> > 
> >>Why not move it to Jabber?  More people use and know what Jabber is
> >>these days than IRC.
> > 
> > Just to prove you wrong: what the hell is Jabber?
> 
>   It is an Instant Messaging Client.

No it's not. It's an IM protocol, implemented by many clients in Debian,
and by many servers on the 'Net.

> (like ICQ, MSN, GoogleTalk,

GoogleTalk, actually, uses the Jabber protocol.

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Re: irc.debian.org

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Mon, May 01, 2006 at 01:24:15AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 
> >>> I agree with Steve. While I agree that freenode has many flaws (the
> >>> biggest being NOIDPRIVMSG), I find that while I am in Debian channels on
> >> Exactly, why is an optional feature such a big flaw?
> >Because it's the default and practically no one changes it. This is a
> Maybe because actually it's not such a big deal? :-)

More likely, because it's hardly documented that this is the default and
because not many people know how to switch it off.

I know *I* had to bitch about it before being told where the
documentation was. And I forgot all about it in the mean time.

> >big problem, because on a network that offers so many support channels,
> >you have a lot of users who are on only to get a question answered (Foo
> >isn't working, what am I doing wrong?). These users have no desire, nor
> >real reason to register a nick. Also, there are lots of times I have
> They do not need to. If you want to receive their privated messages then
> *you* can disable NOIDPRIVMSG and they will not even know about it.

Only if they're lucky enough to try to ask someone who has NOIDPRIVMSG
disabled.

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About terminology for stable/testing/unstable

[Christian Perrier]

A recent discussion popped up in the French l10n mailing list
(http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-french/2006/04/msg00539.html, in
French) about the terminology to use for writing documentation and
making reference to stable/testing/unstable in various parts of our
documentation/web site and even packages (D-I for instance).

The discussion is still not finished to decide what term we should use
in our translations. We currently consistently use "distribution"
which has the same meaning than the English word.

However, when looking at various original documentation we have in the
project about this, it appears that some more consistency could be
achieved. "distribution" is sometimes used (as in
http://www.debian.org/releases/) but so is "suite" (for instance in
most code) and sometimes "version"

The most commonly used term seems to be "distribution", as in the FAQ
or most web pages that talk about stable/testing/unstable.

I however find that this term is somewhat confusing as, for many
outsiders, "distribution" is usually taken as a general term to talk
about different operating systems distributions (or, more trivially
speaking, about "Linux distributions") such as "the Mandriva
distribution", "the Debian distribution" and the like.

A good example of why this may be confusing is the installer. The
debconf question that currently prompts users for choosing between
stable/testing/unstable is labelled: "Debian version to install" dans
says "Debian comes in several flavors"

The installer takes great care of being friendly to newcomers and it
seems quite significant to me that this term was chosenprobably
because "distribution" would have been too confusing.

My personal opinion is that we should maybe use "branch" rather than
"distribution" to avoid that confusion. This is what the French team
is considering (there are some people who object to this, though).

After all, from our users point of view and from what I see when
people use Debian, they choose between stable, testing and unstable
just as if they were choosing between various development branches of
the same software.

Of course, strictly speaking, testing is not a branch because it
mostly automatically derives from unstable but the difference is not
really obvious (and not really significant) for users.

That would leave us with:

Distribution: used to talk about Debian in general, whichever branch
  is used

Branch (or suite): used to talk about stable, testing and unstable
   and explain differences between all of them or the
   ways they are developed 

Release : used to talk about the successive releases of
  Debian as a distribution: potato, woody, sargeas
  well as the release updates

Version : used when using numerical version numbers (3.1r2, etc..)

I understand this is somewhat tricky and it may become very easy to
nitpick about the assumptions I made above but I'd really like to see
us accept that not everything is easy to understand from an outsider
point of view, in our terminology.

Comments welcomed (heh, I subscribed to -project just for this...)



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