Debian outreach internships

[Mattia Rizzolo]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 10:15:54PM +0300, joannah nanjekye wrote:
> Dear Mattia,

Hi Joannah,

sorry for the kinda late reply (I know people tends to like quick
turnarounds for these subjects).

Please take care of subscribing to this mailing list.  I expect that
once you officially apply you will be (but you can avoid it for now, if
you want to).

> I like actively being part of ambitious missions and in my view Debian is
> spot on through the projects currently being worked on and maintained. The
> projects that Debian is undertaking during the internship I believe will
> greatly shape my career and knowledge in software development.

Kind words, just I'm not so confident about the "greatly shape my
career" bit, but for sure some employers appreciate applicants with a
past of contributions to free software projects.

> After looking through the skill set needed , I also saw a good fit for me
> here save for a few other skills I may need to learn through the
> application process especially getting comfortable with packaging. I will
> endeavor I polish up before the deadline on some of them.

I have some troubles understanding what you mean here, especially the
first sentence.
Anyway don't care too much about the effort of Debian packaging, we have
a lot of experts around, and the work there is pretty much done.

> I was also drawn to Debian pretty much due to the community. It is an
> engaging and easily accessible one and to me this is very important. I was
> in touch with people in this community even people I decided to apply for
> outreachy who freely shared what they knew with me. I almost got tempted to
> mention names but I wont:). A big thanks even in their anonymity.

*These* are very kind words now!  I know a lot of people have/had to
fight a lot to enter enough within the Debian community to feel part of
it.  Some areas of Debian used to (still are?) hard to get it.

> I have an idea on concurrent programming much using .net where I used to
> write banking programs that would run simultaneously in windows services.
> Jobs like unattended running of end of day processes for applications that
> ran on top of core banking, automated end of day and bank statement
> transmission through sending transaction files to utility companies on a
> daily basis. These programs ran at the same time and simultaneously and
> were self starting.

This is nice, but I fear our case is quite different; we would like
diffoscope to e.g. walk directories in parallel, and down that road.

> I would like to begin by working on this
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=814057 bug.

That bug is part of a bigger picture where diffoscope would be able to
hide difference (or even better: don't even compute them if not needed)
as requested by the user.  See this wiki page for more information:
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/HideProfilesSpecification
Hence I suggest against trying to start with such a thing, but rather
try to fix a simpler thing, like a crash, or tests failures.  Goal of
the first phase should be to get accustomed to the codebase, tackling
such bug would be way over that goal.

> You can walk
> me through how I can own a bug so that I don't work on the same bug with
> some one else unknowingly

https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#owner
https://www.debian.org/Bugs/server-control#owner

> links to the general work flow guidelines of
> submitting a patch the Debian way if there are any things I need to note.

The usual way is to send a patch as an attachment to a bug report.
Though considering that you'd be contributing code to a "native"
package, and that that package is maintained in git, the preferred form
of sending patches would be to attach them as produced by
    git format-patch
or by using
    git send-email
(but this one requires a bit of set up), as they are easier to
incorporate.

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
more about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
Launchpad user: https://launchpad.net/~mapreri                  `. `'`
Debian QA page: https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=mattia  `-
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