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How would this work? How many project maintainers would sign on for this? "Hey, can you merge this PR? I'll fail if you don't review and merge this by tomorr

How would this work? How many project maintainers would sign on for this? "Hey, can you merge this PR? I'll fail if you don't review and merge this by tomorrow morning. I'm sorry I left it until the last minute but I had a bunch of work do to in another class and couldn't get to it until today." "Hey, I ran everything through flake and black and spent the past 72 hours getting my test coverage (and the coverage of the rest of the project) to 100%. /Now/ will you approve this PR?" "Hey, you stopped responding for the past week, are you on vacation? Is there any chance of approving this PR by Friday?"

skohan 5y ago
Yeah I think this is a huge issue. It might be good for the students to get this experience, but it would be horrible for the projects. People working on a project to check a box is not going to lead to good outcomes. A better option would be to require students to work on projects which depend on eachother, and practice pull-requests on eachother's student projects.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  How about this? The instructor forks a real open source project, with an existing license, contributor guide, etc. The instructor then picks an issue from the issue tracker with a known solution, but no PR yet. The assignment is to submit a PR to the instructor's fork of the project that fixes the issue, and the PR itself is the final project submission. Points can be deducted, according to a rubric, for failing to pass the test suite, failing to follow contribution guidelines, etc. Choosing an issue that has not been publicly resolved in code should prevent obvious cases of plagiarism. I'm not sure if this could scale up to a big lecture-type course with TA is doing the grading, but I think it could be a fun assignment. The risk of course is that there is some unforeseen problem preventing the "known" solution from being valid. But maybe that in and of itself is part of learning exercise...
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    I think that would work. Then the instructor (or a enterprising student) could push the PR back to the real project if it turns out to be worthy of a real merge.
  - skohan 5y ago
    It might work, but there's always the risk that someone submits a PR to the repo between the time the assignment is given and when it is due.
sumtechguy 5y ago
I have also seen some projects where the maintainers do not suffer fools lightly. Pick the wrong project and you would be in for a bad time. I for one wish my university had a few extra classes that were 'practical'. I eventually picked up those skills because I had to. I am not talking 60+ hours of it. Like 5-10 would have been more than plenty. Those skills would have been directly applicable to everything I did while I was there as well. Something simple like 'what is source control', 'practical examples of code organization and refactoring' would have saved me more than a few times in college. But yeah picking an opensource project to dump these skills classes onto will end up as a bad time. Unless the prof/ta is in the mix and helping that project. From my exp from some profs, that is not going to happen.
therealdrag0 5y ago
My schools senior projects were group projects done for real people out in the world. A similar thing could be done where the instructor would solicit a dozen OS projects that would be willing to trade labor for responsiveness.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  My school had a co-op program where we would actually get paid to do real work. I think if you want your university program to teach real world skills, a co-op program is the only non-abusive way to do that.
  - therealdrag0 5y ago
    What’s abusive?
    - Ensorceled 5y ago
      Forcing people to work for corporations for free as part of their education. I paid my way through university with co-op jobs.
      - therealdrag0 5y ago
        Hmm I don’t feel that strongly. But the status quo in schools is forcing people to pay money to work on problems that get thrown away. Why does it become abusive when it might be useful for somebody instead?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bsedlm 5y ago
WHat if schools "economically" motivated them? or maybe the teacher/professor IS on the maintainers list?

skohan 5y ago

Yeah I think this is a huge issue. It might be good for the students to get this experience, but it would be horrible for the projects. People working on a project to check a box is not going to lead to good outcomes. A better option would be to require students to work on projects which depend on eachother, and practice pull-requests on eachother's student projects.

nerdponx 5y ago
How about this? The instructor forks a real open source project, with an existing license, contributor guide, etc. The instructor then picks an issue from the issue tracker with a known solution, but no PR yet. The assignment is to submit a PR to the instructor's fork of the project that fixes the issue, and the PR itself is the final project submission. Points can be deducted, according to a rubric, for failing to pass the test suite, failing to follow contribution guidelines, etc. Choosing an issue that has not been publicly resolved in code should prevent obvious cases of plagiarism. I'm not sure if this could scale up to a big lecture-type course with TA is doing the grading, but I think it could be a fun assignment. The risk of course is that there is some unforeseen problem preventing the "known" solution from being valid. But maybe that in and of itself is part of learning exercise...
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  I think that would work. Then the instructor (or a enterprising student) could push the PR back to the real project if it turns out to be worthy of a real merge.
- skohan 5y ago
  It might work, but there's always the risk that someone submits a PR to the repo between the time the assignment is given and when it is due.

sumtechguy 5y ago

I have also seen some projects where the maintainers do not suffer fools lightly. Pick the wrong project and you would be in for a bad time. I for one wish my university had a few extra classes that were 'practical'. I eventually picked up those skills because I had to. I am not talking 60+ hours of it. Like 5-10 would have been more than plenty. Those skills would have been directly applicable to everything I did while I was there as well. Something simple like 'what is source control', 'practical examples of code organization and refactoring' would have saved me more than a few times in college. But yeah picking an opensource project to dump these skills classes onto will end up as a bad time. Unless the prof/ta is in the mix and helping that project. From my exp from some profs, that is not going to happen.

therealdrag0 5y ago

My schools senior projects were group projects done for real people out in the world. A similar thing could be done where the instructor would solicit a dozen OS projects that would be willing to trade labor for responsiveness.

Ensorceled 5y ago
My school had a co-op program where we would actually get paid to do real work. I think if you want your university program to teach real world skills, a co-op program is the only non-abusive way to do that.
- therealdrag0 5y ago
  What’s abusive?
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    Forcing people to work for corporations for free as part of their education. I paid my way through university with co-op jobs.
    - therealdrag0 5y ago
      Hmm I don’t feel that strongly. But the status quo in schools is forcing people to pay money to work on problems that get thrown away. Why does it become abusive when it might be useful for somebody instead?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bsedlm 5y ago

WHat if schools "economically" motivated them? or maybe the teacher/professor IS on the maintainers list?