[Announcement] Ubuntus MOTU School

[Stephan Hermann]

Good Night,

we just started a new MOTU project with the name "Ubuntus MOTU School".

This idea was born just as a spontaneous introduction session for a single 
MOTU hopeful, to show him the usage of diff and patch, to avoid using dpatch 
or cdbs stuff in his package. During this session some other MOTUs and MOTU 
hopefuls were joining this channel and were listening to what I had to say.

So from just a "stupid and joke-ish" idea to a real serious project it is not 
a big step. 
We think, that we need to do more educational stuff for new packagers/package 
mergers and bug fixing people in the Ubuntu Universe.

For this, we created the #ubuntu-motu-school channel, to teach, explain and 
talk about the basics of packaging, merging and fixing packages.

Right now, we are trying to build a list of topics about what we can "teach" 
or explain to interested new packagers, MOTU Hopefuls or even old cracks like 
Andrew or Oliver. :)

We would like to have some core-devs as contributors or better as speaker for 
some special topics, which we can't cover, e.g. Scott about "Why do we need 
dh_makeshlibs?" or Matthias K. about "C++ Transitions - how to find the right 
packages for \sh to rename" or Adam Conrad/LaMont Jones about "The difference 
of Pbuilder and sbuild", "What is wanna-build and why does it work?"

We will start with lessons without a real timetable. We will announce the 
lessons on the new Ubuntu-motu mailinglist (and ubuntu-devel mailinglist if 
it's appropriate).

For every lesson one "motu pupil" has to sum up the important parts of the 
lesson and will publish it on a "to be named" wiki page, so everybody can 
read again and again the important informations.
With the time going on, we can try to build a small collection of really good 
documentations about debians way of packaging. 

If there are enough attendees who are interested in those lessons I can think 
even of open this channel up for other topics like "Tool programming in 
Python" or "How to use bzr correctly" (James Blackwell is the right person 
for this topic I think)

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Well, just a short annotation why this channel is named "ubuntu-motu-school".

Debian has as first introduction to "packaging" their "Debians New Maintainer 
Guide". I for myself, responsible for the name of the channel, don't like 
this name at all, because it sounds cold and artificial. 
The word "school" is something which sounds warm and is familiar to most of 
us. "School" was not all the time, but most of the time "Fun". And if you are 
older, just as I am, then the "School" is something you are really missing. 
The "Ubuntu MOTU School" is not something with force...only if you are 
interested in some really rocking stuff, we will be happy if you join us.

So, I hope you agree with us, that we need to do more "teaching" to bring the 
knowledge from us to them and let them be one of us.

We hope you like the idea and we hope you will help us to accomplish this 
difficult goal.

Thank you for your attention and have a good morning, afternoon or night, 
whereever you are.

For the Ubuntu MOTU Team,

Stephan aka \sh