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Bug 60301 - DK Smith (dks)
Summary: DK Smith (dks)
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Gentoo Developers/Staff
Classification: Unclassified
Component: New Developers (show other bugs)
Hardware: All All
: High normal (vote)
Assignee: Gentoo Recruiting Team
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2004-08-14 01:28 UTC by John Mylchreest (RETIRED)
Modified: 2004-10-10 19:23 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---


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Description John Mylchreest (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-08-14 01:28:58 UTC
First of all, my appologies for the dealy on this.
Can we please push this user into dev status?

I am happy to mentor him.

Area of Interest: kernel work

DK, can you please submit your ssh public key (I can help you with these if you need), your gpg public key ID and contact details to someone in devrel. They will contact you regarding the quiz, if you need explanations on the questions please ask, its better you understand.

Many thanks :)
Comment 1 DK Smith 2004-08-18 10:38:46 UTC
Greetings:

Am I waiting to interact with someone in devrel?

:)

Thank you...
Comment 2 Deedra Waters (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-08-25 07:08:11 UTC
Quiz received.
 Please try 3b again. You left out cvs steps.
 
 Please try 9a again. confusing...
 #8.... More info please...
 
 Please attach gpg and ssh2 dsa public keys, do not include them in the actual quiz text.
 
 Profile  questions:
 Please fill in the gpg key id, don't stick the key in there.
 You never answered the profile question, and date of birth questions. Please answer those.
 Please also provide your realname. This is a requirement.
 
 Please send all of this info to recruiters@gentoo.org .
 
 Thanks!
Comment 3 Deedra Waters (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-08-31 10:22:33 UTC
Dk, We need the quiz answers to the questions I mentioned in my last comment please..
 
 I might see if I can find someone who can help mentor him a bit better. Or rather, someone who can give a second opinion.
 He seems like a nice guy, but I'm getting the impression he may not understand gentoo well?
 Since johnm isn't mentoring him, and he hasn't come talk to me on irc to resolve any of this, I am going to see if I can find someone else to try and  talk to him and give another opinion.
 
Comment 4 DK Smith 2004-08-31 11:46:55 UTC
Hello Everyone,

Is this process supposed to be friendly? At least I had the impression it would be friendly.  :)

I see that Deedra has expressed her opinion about my inadequate understanding of Gentoo. I disagree with her sentiment and I fail to see what constructive use her comments have in this process. (or in this bug report). If the comment was designed apply pressure on me to return the answers, then all I can tell you is that it worked. I am terribly sorry for keeping you waiting since we last spoke on August 30, one day ago.

After all the delays I have experienced since being invited to become a developer (in June, IIRC), is there now a deadline that I am supposed to meet with regard to the submission of the revised answers? If there is a deadline, then I was not informed about it. If my interpretation of impatience is indeed incorrect, then I am willful and happy to be corrected. 
 
I apologize for the 5 day delay between the day the quiz results were posted to this bug report and my awareness of that fact. Things have been kind of hectic and I honestly do not remember getting a notice via E-mail like the one I rcv's regarding Deedra's comment. 

I say things have been hectic recently because we had a family member die on Suunday. Other than inquiring on Monday as to where what the next steps were, I have been a bit distracted on matters not pertaining to Gentoo for the last couple of days... Hence I have not yet even started doing the research necessary to accommodate the provisioning of corrected answers to the quiz. That is, to the questions I did not fully understand, yet. 


Now I have a question: 

I would like to know if Deedra, or anyone else for that matter has taken a look at the bugs I have reported against Gentoo. If I were in your shoes and someone new came along and reported bugs that have apparently been missed by significantly more experienced people (for a long time), then I would think that the new person might have something to offer. 

These bugs were obvious to me after a minimal amount of use with Gentoo's portage system. Although I am a software engineer with nearly 15 years of professional experience in corporate or government computing environments, I only have been using Gentoo on a regular basis for about 3 months. I switched all my systems to Gentoo during the last 3 weeks.  

The severity of bugs I am talking about are those that break people's systems, or destroy configuration data in "/etc"... People are in the Gentoo forums suffering needlessly for months if not years due to one or two of the bugs I reported. All the while forum users and forum gurus are chasing down these wild goose chases while not appearing to understand the root cause of some of the problems they are trying to solve were coming from the 2004.1 or the 2004.2 livecd. As I mentioned, the bugs seemed pretty obvious to me after I started understanding Portage. But the bugs were not reported and remained live for quite a long time. So the "gurus" on the forums and the gurus on the mailing lists that have been using and contributing to Gentoo for several years did not find such obvious an obvious USE flag bug. 

Also, please note that due to the fact that my mentor is an exceedingly busy person, I thought the best way to get feedback from my quiz was to submit my first draft. After all, this is a community that prides itself on mutual respect and collaboration. DRobbins was all about that, right. None of that Debian arrogance here, right? 

So I thought...  what not a better way to strike up conversations with other developers than to enter into a conversation about those areas where other developers felt I needed more information or knowledge about particular facilitiies. I thought it would have been a collaborative process, possibly meeting on IRC, to discuss details and nuances of particular topics. 

But I was not so fortunate... I only rcv'd an impatient denunciation that Deedra feels I am not about to contribute with my current knowledge level, so we need a 2nd opinion to make the decision to reject me? That is what I am gathering from  Deedra's post... I hope someone can pls clarify... 

One has to note that Deedra may be interpreting the quiz answers as a definitive and exhaustive  demonstration of my knowledge of Gentoo. However that was not the spirit in which I submitted the document. 

What I submitted was a first draft with answers that I felt would provoke dialog. I purposefully made it obvious where I lacked adequate understanding, sometimes flagging the spot with an exlicit marker. 

I have found that the best way to learn is to be be honest with those around you regarding that which one does not know. Then the good information comes your way reatively freely... causing one to learn faster. :)

The document (quiz ans) Deedra is using to support her claim that my knowledge is inadequate, was actually a device I was using to elict feedback from those that know more than me. 

I called that a strategy a couple weeks ago. 

Now it has become a Catch-22. 

Cheers
DK
Comment 5 Deedra Waters (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-08-31 12:07:40 UTC
It's not a opinion, it's a concern. When I bring a person on, I want to make sure that they know about gentoo, and understand how things work. If there's a concern about that person, I will state it, because I want that person to know that it is a concern, and give that person a chance to respond. I don't think anyone would like it if I didn't  let them know what I was concerned about, and then just denied them. That wouldn't be right, or fair to them.
 
 I haven't seen your bug till Johnm filed the bug, so I honestly don't know of any previous invitations for you regarding becoming a dev..
 
 I asked you to come talk to me on irc a couple of times so that I could discuss your quiz with you since your mentor wasn't really around, but you never responded to my requests. Your non-responsiveness to my request lead me to believe that you didn't want/or/had no intention of coming to talk to me on irc.
 
 My request for a second opinion was simpley that. I wanted someone elses opinion because if I'm wrong about a new dev, then I would hope that someone else might be able to help clear things up a bit.
Comment 6 DK Smith 2004-08-31 12:42:09 UTC
I am sorry but I did not interpret you E-mail message as you may have intended.

Here it is:

August 30, 2004 1:31:33 PM PDT

Come talk to me on irc. First thing to do though, is fix the answers on
the quiz that I pointed out to you.


On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, DK Smith wrote:
> 
> Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 12:10:44 -0700
> From: DK Smith <dks@mediaweb.com>
> To: Deedra Waters <dmwaters@gentoo.org>
> Subject: developer formalities
> 
> Hello again...
> 
> I was wondering if you can give me any insight into what to do next?
> I realize you said this was not your job...  so I apologize for asking
> you.
> Maybe you can gently "prod" whomever is supposed to contact me next?
> 
> Thx
> DK
> 

#########################


I understood your message to communicate two main messages:

1. Talk to me on IRC

This I thought was in response to my question about what the next steps were... You answered that quesion in e-mail. I am sorry if I did not formally thank you for your invitation because I had already rcv'd the info I needed from you via the e-mail. 

In fact, I sent two responses thanking you for the information because we got out of sync on e-mail messages wherein you sent me another message telling me AGAIN that the info was on bugs.g.o, after which i had alredy sent you a message indicating that I found the quiz response. I was grateful for your direction as to where to find the results to the quiz. 

2. First thing to do though, is fix the answers on the quiz that I pointed out to you.

To any person that is versed in logic like I am (a literal minded individual), your statement indicated that before anything else takes place, I needed to submit new answers to the quiz. 

I honestly do not see how I was to understand that you were inviting me to a discussion on IRC to discuss the quiz answers. You clearly state, that before anything else, I need to fix the answers to the quiz. IOW, that the first thing to do was get on IRC with you? Had you expressed the snetences differently then maybe I would have understood that you were inviting me to discuss issues related to Portage or CVS. Had I interpreted it that way, then I would gladly have found a space in between the family gatherings to meet you on IRC. 
 
At the time, however, I did not need to get on IRC to find out how to use bugs.g.o, which is what I thought you were inviting me to do in order to find my quiz results.

I also want to dispute the claims that Deedra has invited me to talk on IRC "a couple of times", I believe this to be inaccurate as it only occured once and that was on Monday, the day after my Uncle died. As I mentioned, my days have been somewhat hectic the last few days... 

What follows are all the of the E-mail messages I have rcv'd from Deedra (for the record). I only see one invitation to IRC and that I thought was to direct me to the bugs.g.o, NOT to review the questions on which I need more study. 

---

August 20, 2004 10:37:39 AM PDT

Jhuebel, can you take him?

###

August 20, 2004 11:36:23 AM PDT

Np, I'd take care of  you myself, but I can't do much this week. If
jhuebel doesn't get back to me by monday, I'll take care of you then.

Make sure you have the quiz and keys sent into recruiters though, soon

###

August 20, 2004 1:21:25 PM PDT

http://devrel.gentoo.org/recruiters
http://devrel.gentoo.org/quiz
http://devrel.gentoo.org/new-dev-training.xml

Theese should help get you started. Technically, Johnm should be the one
giving you this info, not m e since he is your mentor. I will discuss
that with him though, and that is not your fault.

###

August 30, 2004 1:31:33 PM PDT

Come talk to me on irc. First thing to do though, is fix the answers on
the quiz that I pointed out to you.


###

August 30, 2004 2:04:26 PM PDT

check your new dev bug. I placed the response to your quiz there.

###

August 30, 2004 2:59:14 PM PDT

check your new developer bug. that is where my response is...

###


Cheers,
DK

PS: I am finding it a little odd that I have to use this bug report to dispute inaccuracies and minsundertandings... Is this the typical of the vetting process? Just part of the initiation?



Comment 7 Jon Portnoy (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-08-31 12:44:55 UTC
I'd like to put this on hold until I can speak to johnm (Stuart says he'll be gone until the weekend).
Comment 8 John Mylchreest (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-09-05 10:46:35 UTC
Just my two cents.

I think the current issue is the lack of bugs to judge with on bugzilla, and the immediate misunderstanding that has come about.

I feel that the lack of bugs is not so much of an issue, since a lot of the work which would have come about wrt the kernel work may not have made it to bugzilla. However, the requirement to prove ability in a more suitable environment is of course neccessary.

Can I offer a proposal here?

DK, can you please come on IRC some time which is convenient (irc.freenode.org/#gentoo-dev) and have a little chat with dmwaters.
if you need to, /msg her :)
If it would make you more comfortable, I can also be there.

Also, what I would like to do is to give you some work to do if thats OK, and I will post results/outcome on here as to log progress.

Generally the recruitment process has all progress or otherwise noted onto the initial bug. Please dont feel like any of this is personal. it is simply part of routine. both recruitment and the herd in which you will be working need assurance of your abilities before we can close the recruitment procedures off.
Comment 9 Seemant Kulleen (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2004-10-10 19:23:04 UTC
hmm, this person is rather sensitive to regular things we do as recruiters.  This constant misinterpretation and overly long-winded rants don't do much to enhance him.  Closing as WONTFIX.  If someone else wishes to tutor/mentor him and get him to have a bigger history in bugzilla, go for it and reopen if and when appropriate.  For now, though, the matter is closed.