[Reportbug-maint] How about we ask students at Allegheny college to improve reportbug's UI?

[Matthew Jadud]

Hi Stefano,

(I'm not on the reportbug-maint list, so I removed it from the CC line.)

On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 03:57, Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at debian.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 11:51:34PM -0400, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
>> Dear reportbug team, (CC:ing Zack in case he cares,)

> let's clarify that there is no need of extra work from them in the
> initial phase. I believe the students can work on the interaction

This is true. That said, I want to make sure that any community that
I'm working with is aware that we are operating on a tight timetable
-- my fixed, 16-week timetable is an unfortunate challenge when
interfacing between an open source community and academia. Hence,
knowing that the students can interact with the community, and that
they'll be responsive, matters to me.

In truth, it is likely that this isn't an issue, but I thought it was
important to highlight in my call.

> free software, they can propose changes, submit patches, but it's
> ultimately up to the software maintainer to decide what to do with
> them. I believe that clarifying that in the beginning can avoid bad
> feelings later on in case the reportbug maintainers will decide they
> don't like the proposed changes.

Absolutely. I'm 100% aware of this, and the students will be aware of
this as well. That said, if a community is definitely not interested
in interface efforts (at all or at this time), then I have little
desire to point the students at the project.

So, for example, if the reportbug maintainers are not genuinely
interested in interface efforts taking place (that is, they know
they're not going to give serious consideration to anything the
student team does), then that wouldn't be my first choice of a project
to target student effort.

> Another venue where I would personally propose to use them is in the
> aptitude command line and ncurses interfaces.

I'll have to think about how the students would do interface testing
with command-line tools... it isn't something I've done as part of
this kind of course in the past. But, yes, I can see why there would
be a lot of value in looking at those tools, and it *is* an
interface...

Many, many thanks,
Matt