Accomplishments – Should I write one?
by José Antonio Rey
As many of you know, Jono Bacon, along with other people, has been developing a system called Ubuntu Accomplishments, which is very cool, indeed. You earn trophies for doing different things in the community, or locally. The system even has its own daemon!
But, the problem is: We need accomplishments writers! Although writing one seems very complicated, it’s much easier than it seems. For me, it took less than 45 minutes, including a step-by-step class on how to use bzr to upload and propose for merging by Rafal Cieślak. Then, if you’re just writing it, it would be around 15-20 minutes. I started working on a “Gain an Ubuntu Member Cloak” accomplishment. Here’s what I did:
- Write the script. When writing the script, if the accomplishment needs to be verified by checking if you’re a LP team member, you can just grab one of the scripts and modify it writing the correct team name (these are on the scripts folder, in the trunk branch). In my case, I used the motu.py script, and replaced motu bu ubuntu-irc-cloaks. Save your script with a name (name.py).
- Write the accomplishment file. You should use one of the accomplishments that is already created, modifying it with the correct information again (these are in the accomplishments folder, in the trunk branch again). Just fill in the correct information, and you’ve done it. Remember that, as it’ll be our official accomplishments program, it should be a squeakly clean and great documentation. Save this file with the name name.accomplishment.
- Write the test file. One more time, you can just grab this from the test files. In this you should specify two emails. The success email, is to give the tester a positive result, it means that it should be the email of an user that has already accomplished what needed, and so on with the fail email. You should save it with the name <name> (with no <>).
- Once you’ve done that, you should upload it to a personal branch, and ask for review.
After all this process, my accomplishment got into the collection, check it out!
Remember that all your files should be named under the same name. As you can see, this is not so difficult. I hope many of you get into this fun and helpful process. You can check http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accomplishments/Creating/Guidelines for the guidelines. If you need any further help, just go to #ubuntu-accomplishments in freenode. Thanks to all of you who have already contributed, and to all of those who will contribute to us!
[...] source: Go to Source Feed source: http://planet.debian.org/deriv/rss20.xml License: The original licenses are retained [...]
The channel for requesting cloaks is #ubuntu-irc, not #ubuntu-irc-council. I’m not sure where you got the latter from; is there documentation that points users to the latter channel for cloaks? (if so, it needs fixing)
I’m not sure about the cloak formats section either. Valid cloaks are, for example, ubuntu/member/sabdfl, debian/developer/ubuntu.sabdfl, or ubuntu/member/debian.sabdfl. When secondary projects are used, they don’t have a role field (i.e, there’s only project and nick fields, separated by a period). This is probably more freenode’s fault, since we’ve (I’m a member of freenode staff) been inconsistant about it in the past, but again, if there’s documentation saying otherwise, let me know so I can get it fixed.
Assuming the software allows hyperlinks, http://freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IRC/Cloaks would be useful to have there.
Being more general, it concerns me that Ubuntu Achievements might basically end up being a repository for documentation about Ubuntu community processes that’s segregated from other documentation like the wiki. Like the wiki, achievements will sometimes stagnate, get out of date, and have inaccuracies, but updating a repository is more hassle than editing a page, and (resumably, I haven’t checked) repositories have gatekeepers that need to approve changes.
The Accomplishments collection is not by any means meant to work as documentation for Ubuntu community. Accomplishment details pages – e.g. the one you can see on the provided screenshot – are not designed to be a complete documentation. Most of them lacks tons of information which might be useful, but instead point to wiki pages and other resources (of course there is a link to IRC/Cloaks, it’s just not visible on the screenshot, links section is placed below). The purpose of instructions about how to complete an accomplishment is to explain steps that have to be taken, working as a brief summary of the actual documentation. This also works the other way round – there is lots of information in accomplishment details which are never found in documentation – e.g. tips&tricks on how one should complete accomplishment, like “Do not apply for a Forums Staff member if you have been a forums user for less then 12 months, because this will simply waste Forum Council members’ time.”.
We definitely do not want to provide documentation via alternative means, and looking through more than few accomplishments makes it clear that this is a very very brief summary – if anyone wants to learn details, there are links to the REAL documentation
provided.
The problem of updating accomplishment information is valid, but still not something that would make it badly managed. At the moment such bugs are fixed by a bunch of contributors, and the accomplishment collection updates are released periodically. In far future the system might event get integrated with a web-editor, which would make things even easier for the management team.