Hello, On Wed, 14 May 2008, senthilraja P wrote: > Basically, even though the students are interested, they are > handicapped because of lack of basic skills required for a foss project. > > Some example i can quote are: > * Lack of knowledge of SVN. (its one of basic operations in any FOSS > project) > * Lack of knowledge of IRC > * Lack of knowledge of Colloboration softwares. (like wiki, Project > Management etc)
I don't think that any of these is a real handicap. To give a weak example, when I started working with Debian, I did not know any of these. What is _essential_ is that students should be willing to: 1. Read a lot. (Source code, documentation, etc.) 2. Collaborate as group in this activity. 3. Tinker with programs and systems. In some ways this is different from their usual experience with software which is almost the opposite: a. Write a lot of code (also called "bugging" by Djkstra!) b. Be competitive c. Avoid breaking things Regards, Kapil. PS. An example is the recent discovery of the Debian Security Bug. It involves a lot of 1-3 but very little of a-c! Surely, tremendous kudos go to Luciano Bello for discovering the problem and the Debian OpenSSL Team for handling its fix. -- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
