hi everyone, I apologize for the trouble caused by this influx of review requests - I am a professor at Northeastern University (Boston, MA US) and am teaching a coding class for my Department, named "Essential computing skills for bioengineers". This is the first time I offer this class, and I have about 18 students this semester (mixture of undegrad, MS and PhD students). The course covers software licenses, Linux, command line, regular expressions, MATLAB/Python among other topics. I am not a DD, but packaged some of the tools developed by my lab in the past.
As a midterm project, I asked every student to identify an open-source software (1. DFSG compatible license, 2. being actively maintained, 3. show reasonable user adoption) that has not been carried by Debian and create an initial package for Debian. I was hoping, at least with my initial intent, that some of my students would like to continue polishing the package after taking the class, although I share the same concern that many of them will lose the drive after the assignment is over. I also have to admit that most students in my class - similarly in many other universities, have extremely limited/low experience working with Linux prior to taking my class - sadly, but this is the reality. This is also a key reason I wanted to include lectures such as open-source licenses and Linux in my class because I think there is an urgent need in higher education to expose students to these topics. However, I did not have the intent to add any unwanted burdens to the mentors if the submissions are of low quality - I haven't started evaluating these submissions as the due date was only two days ago. I apologize for not giving a heads-up for this training exercise. I am happy to reach out to my students, and get a list of packages that the submitters are committed to finishing the work and potentially maintain those in the future. For the rest, I agree that there is no need to spend time reviewing if it obviously needs a lot of work. In the future repetition of this class (not decided yet), I will limit students to using local resources only, and do some screening before allowing them to post in debian mailing lists. I would also be happy to invite any debian developers who are willing to teach university students on Debian culture/development/packaging/maintenance and guest lectures (remotely) - I will reach out in the future. Qianqian On Mon, Nov 18, 2024 at 4:24 AM Andrey Rakhmatullin <w...@wrar.name> wrote: > Hello. > It looks like the phenomenon of obvious students mass-submitting open > source changes, because they were requested to, has come to Debian in the > form of ITP+RFS. While those changes are, in my experience, almost never > worth the time spent reviewing, they are sometimes good. But there can be > no good *one-time* ITP+RFS, and I don't think the assignment requires the > students to actually maintain the packages in Debian. So I suggest people > doing reviews to not spent extra time explaining why specifically packages > like https://mentors.debian.net/package/broot/ or > https://mentors.debian.net/package/stc/ are bad (but it's up to you, just > be aware). > Thanks. > > -- > WBR, wRAR >
