Wow, after 2:15 hours of continuous IRC hacking, my brain is fried and at least 3-4 people followed the introduction (thanks to bignose for the editing) to Manoj’s packaging art I gave in #pkg-zope. I think it was successful, but there are lessons to be learnt:
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Prepare a simple example. I planned to do so, but today was just too bad a day and I did not get to it.
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Do your own hacking somewhere where people can see it, e.g. on alioth (if it isn’t down), in a publicly readable directory. Consider typescript.
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Have two people, or more. Manoj helped out a lot, but he wasn’t prepared, so I felt sorry for putting him on the spot. Two people are needed when a problem arises: then one can fix it while the other fields peripheral questions.
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Have the log appear live on the web somewhere, so late-joiners can catch up.
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Grow an extra 30 fingers. Learn Dvorak. Man, my fingers ache.
What is good though is that as the demonstrator, you have to type everything twice — into the shell and into the IRC window. That gives the people following the demo twice as much time to try things themselves.
I think we should have more demos of this kind in our community.
Update: I had to give up the wiki on my server and the Debian admins have not yet had the time to incorporate the pages into the Debian wiki proper.
Anyway, I suggest against the use of arch, which is a bit too cumbersome. Have a look at some of the other VCS to do what you want. For instance, I just published a typescript from a recent presentation on using modern VCS for Debian packaging, in which I use git for the same workflow.
