Open Source Comes to Campus/Curriculum/Saturday

Note well: This is just a draft; work in progress.

The command line, packages, and dependencies

 * /CLI

Communicating as a user: finding the community and getting help

 * User communication

Ethics and history of open source; and economics and licensing that support it

 * Ethics and history

Getting, modifying, and verifying open source software (getting code; local patching)

 * /Getting modifying and verifying

Project organization (bug trackers; git format-patch; github; people's roles in a project)
Pre-requisites: ?

Learning objectives: Understand the question of who makes tarballs. Be able to, given an arbitrary project, decide where to send a patch. Be able to contribute to discussions on bug trackers.

Group discussion


 * 5 min: Briefly discuss different decision-making structures within a project
 * "Benevolent dictator", as within Linux
 * Decentralized do-ocracy, as within Debian


 * 10 min: Discuss different roles (aka job descriptions) within a project, and what skills they need; preferably painting a picture by using a specific person in a specific project each time
 * Documentation author
 * Artwork contributor
 * Code contributor
 * Code reviewer
 * Bug submitter
 * Security reviewer
 * Bug manager (AKA triager)
 * Security contact
 * Publicity person (e.g., blogger, or release-notes author or conference-goer)
 * Release manager
 * User supporter


 * 5 min: Explain "forking", both hostile and non-hostile


 * Quick introduction to "normal" (AKA decentralized) VCSs, vs. old-style centralized ones
 * In git and friends, anyone can "commit"
 * Anyone can push their work anywhere
 * Centralized ones are like this but more restricted.

Individual work


 * Have students take some simple-ish code project and modify it to work differently, perhaps with just adding their name to AUTHORS, and push their modded version to Github and submit a pull request.
 * Examine one of a few amusing bugs (randomly assigned to different students) and explain the bug to the student next to you
 * If you need help understanding the bug, talk to a teacher who will explain it.
 * Examine one snapshotted bug in a project, and explain what further work is needed to push the patch along. (Example: Fx bug where on Windows 7, all the bug needed was someone to fix its coding style.)

Assessment elements


 * Students make sure the other student's github pull request is right.
 * Optional: Make there be a github training mission.
 * Students explain to one-another what work is required on a bug.

Possible problems