Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] recruitment process

[Richard Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On 04/05/2010 03:48 AM, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Mon, 05 Apr 2010 03:33:52 +0200
> Tobias Heinlein<keytoaster@gentoo.org>  wrote:
>> 3) Questions that aren't that important at all and would just be "nice
>> to know".
>> [snip]
>> Examples for these:
>>
>> 5. What is wrong with using $(somecommand) or `somecommand` or $ARCH
>> 	inside SRC_URI, DEPEND, etc?
>> 	[Devmanual, Caching]
>
> How the heck is this not important? Anyone who doesn't immediately know
> the answer to this has absolutely no business touching any ebuild that
> might end up being given to someone else.
>

My concern with these kinds of questions is that there really isn't any 
page where we have key gotchas consolidated like "don't execute external 
programs in global scope."  Sure, it is in the devmanual, and if you 
read the whole thing then maybe you might remember that one bit in 
particular.

I agree that somebody who doesn't know this particular fact shouldn't be 
committing ebuilds.  My concern is that we don't really have any way to 
make people aware of that particular fact.

Honestly, I think it would be just as effective to simply write up a 
single webpage with thou shalt not's, and not make people go hunting all 
over the place to figure out the whys.  By all means have a link on each 
thou shalt not to the reason.

There are lots of people who would be perfectly capable of doing many 
developer activities who might not come in knowing about the metadata 
cache.  They don't need to know the nuts and bolts of how it works, just 
what they need to do to avoid problems with it.

In any case, giving hints as to the location of the answer in this kind 
of a question seems fine to me.  The important thing is that the 
candidate dev learn about the potential problem - not that they figure 
it out 100% on their own.  Still, the socratic method is a good approach 
to teaching, so I'm not opposed to the Q&A format of the quiz in 
general.  We just need to let candidates know that we're there to help 
them succeed and the quiz is a tool - the goal isn't to eliminate any 
potential contributor who doesn't come to the table knowing as much 
about Gentoo as any seasoned dev.

Rich