[Courses] New course: tools for participating in Free Software

[Mary]

Hi everyone,

I'm planning to run a new course on the courses list shortly. It will
cover tools for participating in Free Software and related development.
This will *mostly* be course about version control systems, but some of
the earlier lessons will cover other things.

The version control lessons will focus on two things: an overview of
concepts, followed by examples in three separate version control
systems. This will be hands on, as in you will actually get practice
working using a revision control system.

To follow the course, subscribe to the courses mailing list at
http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/courses and make sure that
you're following *at least* the "Participating in Free Software" topic.

I'll be posting lessons (courses list lessons are just mailing list
posts on a particular topic) starting Sunday 18th September. I've put
dates next to the lessons, but might be a day or two out :)

The lessons will be:

 Sun Sept 18: Introduction and overview

 Thu Sept 22: Ways you can contribute to Free Software (code, documentation,
 user help, artwork...)

 Sun Sept 25: Coordination tools: bug trackers and mailing lists

 Thu Sept 29: Community tools: Chat programs, blogging and conferences.

[Now we get to the meaty stuff with version control, so I'm going to
post once a week from here on.]

 Thu Oct 6: an introduction to version control 1: what problem does it
 solve?

 Thu Oct 13: an introduction to version control 2: concepts (versions,
 checking out, committing, respositories)

 Thu Oct 20: introduction to our three VCSs: CVS, Subversion and Bazaar
 (version 2)

 Thu Oct 27: checking out, making a change, and committing it

 Thu Nov 3: conflicts: what happens when your changes clash?

 Thu Nov 10: setting up your own repository

[from here on, we'll be working exclusively with Bazaar 2]

 Thu Nov 17: an introduction to version control 3: distributed version
 control

 Thu Nov 24: simple distributed version control with Bazaar

-Mary