Apprenticeship periods at university, working on Ubuntu!

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

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