/ 
parrot-0.1.2
/ docs/gettingstarted.pod

NAME

docs/gettingstarted.pod - Parrot Developer FAQ

DEVELOPER FAQ

I'm interested in helping out. What should I do?

You're already on the right track. This FAQ should help you find everything you need to become an active member of the Parrot community. Just look through the questions below and read the ones that apply to you.

Where can I get Parrot?

  • If you're just interested in browsing the CVS repository without downloading anything, a few interfaces exist.

    http://cvs.perl.org/cvsweb/parrot/

    http://cvs.perl.org/viewcvs/parrot/

  • The easiest solution is to grab the most recent snapshot of the Parrot CVS repository. It's a tar-gzipped download of a recent checkout of Parrot, updated every six hours. You can find it here:

    http://cvs.perl.org/snapshots/parrot/parrot-latest.tar.gz

  • Even better is the option to use CVS, which gets you the very latest copy of the Parrot distribution. The procedure for this is:

    cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.perl.org:/cvs/public login

    [press enter at the password prompt]

    cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.perl.org:/cvs/public co parrot

  • Or, if you're one of those rsync folks, you can access the repository with:

    rsync -av --delete cvs.perl.org::parrot-HEAD parrot

For the Parrot CVS website with the above instructions, check out:

http://cvs.perl.org/

Now that I've got Parrot, what do I do?

Now that you've downloaded Parrot, you probably want to try it out. All you need is Perl 5.005_03 or later, a C compiler (any ANSI C compliant compiler should do - if you find one that doesn't work, please report it to us), and some reasonable form of make. To do this, follow these three easy steps.

  1. cd to your parrot directory and run Configure.pl to create the makefile for your platform.

  2. Run make to compile everything and build parrot.

  3. Run make test to run the test suite and verify that everything works on your system.

Where's the Parrot documentation?

Well, Parrot documentation is a great place to contribute, should you be looking for something to do. Figure out which parts were confusing, and either help us fix them, or let us know where we should fix them. Luckily, all of the current Parrot documentation is included along with the Parrot distribution, in the /docs/ directory.

There is also some experimental auto-generated HTML documentation available by running the following command in the Parrot distribution's root directory:

% perl tools/docs/write_docs.pl -s

To view the HTML documentation start with the page docs/html/index.html.

There are a few categories of documentation, each with different intents. It'll probably help to be aware of them before you go digging in. I highly suggest you check out /docs/pdds/pdd07_codingstd.pod for guidelines on how documentation is supposed to be laid out. For now, here's the executive summary:

  • PDDs

    Parrot Design Documents (PDDs) document the basic design of the Parrot interpreter, with each PDD focusing on a particular topic, such as the design of the garbage collector (PDD 09) or the object system (PDD 15). They can be found in the /docs/pdds directory.

    NB: Some important areas are still missing PDDs; we're working to rectify that.

  • Developer files

    These are files which correspond to a specific source file, and can be found in /docs/dev/. A developer file contains documentation on all the implementation decisions associated with the source file. (Note that this is in contrast to PDDs, which describe design decisions). This is the place for mini-essays on how to avoid overflows in unsigned arithmetic, or on the pros and cons of differing hash algorithms, and why the current one was chosen, and how it works.

    If you are coming to a particular source file for the first time, you should be able to read the .dev file and gain an immediate overview of what the source file is for, the algorithms it implements, etc.

    NB: We need more .dev files too. Patches welcome!

  • Source file documentation

    Each source file includes comments embedded in the document. Usually this means function-level documentation that describes the purpose and intent of a function, along with any other important information. For larger functions, it will include additional documentation that explains the meaning of code, as opposed to a verbatim translation of code.

Where can I find the main developer mailing list?

Most of the Parrot-related development discussion occurs on the perl6-internals mailing list. There are a variety of interfaces to the list:

  • Mailing List Interface (subscribing, unsubscribing, etc)

    http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl6-internals

  • NNTP Interface

    news://nntp.perl.org/perl.perl6.internals

    http://nntp.x.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.internals

  • Archives

    http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=perl.perl6.internals

    http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.internals

  • Searching

    There are no directly searchable interfaces to the mailing lists. However, Google works quite well. After clicking the below links, just add your search terms to the Google search box.

    http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=site:archive%2Edevelooper%2Ecom+perl6+internals

    http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=perl.perl6.internals

  • Summaries

    If you find the traffic too much to keep up with, weekly summaries of the discussion on perl6-internals@perl.org and perl6-language@perl.org are posted to perl6-announce@perl.org. Alternately, you can find these summaries here:

    http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.announce

    http://dev.perl.org/perl6/list-summaries/

    Or if you prefer to subscribe to the list:

    http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=perl6-announce

In addition, there is a mailing list which logs all commits to the Parrot CVS repository. If you're interested in Parrot development, you might find it very helpful to subscribe and keep up on changes that people are making.

  • Mailing List Interface (subscribing, unsubscribing, etc)

    http://lists.perl.org/showlist.cgi?name=cvs-parrot

  • NNTP Interface

    news://nntp.perl.org/perl.cvs.parrot

    http://nntp.x.perl.org/group/perl.cvs.parrot

  • Archives

    http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=perl.cvs.parrot

    http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cvs.parrot

  • Searching

    After clicking the below links, just add your search terms to the Google search box.

    http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=site:archive%2Edevelooper%2Ecom+cvs+parrot

    http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=perl.cvs.parrot

What other ways can I get in contact with the Parrot developers?

The mailing list is the main resource for Parrot development. However, there is an IRC channel which you may find useful if your problem is better solved with real-time discussion. To find this channel, visit the channel #parrot in the following IRC servers (either one will do):

irc://irc.rhizomatic.net/ or irc://irc.pobox.com/

I've developed a patch. What should I do with it?

There's a lot of traffic that goes through the mailing list, and it's quite possible that if you send patches directly to the mailing list, they will get lost in the mailboxes of those with commit access.

As such, a better solution would be to submit your patch to RT, the request tracker system that maintains bugs and patches for the Parrot project. To visit RT, go here:

http://bugs6.perl.org/

Or if you want to submit a patch, send an email to bugs-parrot@bugs6.perl.org with the moniker [PATCH] (including the brackets) at the start of the subject so that it can be appropriately tagged in the RT system. Please note that you do not have to CC perl6-internals@perl.org when reporting a bug. The RT system will correctly handle that on its own.

A listing of the pending patches can be found here:

http://www.parrotcode.org/openpatches

I've found a bug, what now?

Well, if you know enough about the bug that you can fix the problem, please do so. Then you can create a patch and submit it to the list, with a better chance of your bug getting attention. If you're not able to solve it on your own, we're still interested in seeing what the problem is, and hopefully helping to resolve it. To report a bug, email bugs-parrot@bugs6.perl.org with a brief description of your bug in the subject. For more information about the bug management system, see the previous question.

What other useful resources are there for developers?

There are several other useful resources that can be found via:

http://www.parrotcode.org/resources

  • Experimental Parrot Wiki

    Located at:

    http://www.vendian.org/parrot/wiki/

    A collection of various other pieces of useful Parrot information and documentation that have yet to make it into the CVS repository. Includes a comprehensive guide to getting started with Parrot development (called, unsurprisingly, 'Getting Started with Parrot Development').

  • Tinderbox

    The tinderbox consists of a number of different computers running various OS and platform configurations, downloading the latest Parrot distribution every few hours and running the test suite to verify that it works on that given combination of software and hardware.

    To view the results of the tinderbox system, check out:

    http://tinderbox.perl.org/tinderbox/bdshowbuild.cgi?tree=parrot

  • Tinderbox Failure Summary

    A brief summary of the current status of the various tinderbox machines. Useful for finding out which tests are failing (if any).

  • Test Coverage Results

    The Parrot test suite is intended to test all aspects of Parrot's code. You can see how successful we are at this goal by checkout the test coverage. It gives line, branch, and call coverage percentages on a per-file or per-function breakdown. Find it here:

    http://www.hitchhiker.org/parrot_coverage/

  • Bonsai

    Bonsai is a cvs tree control tool to monitor the status of cvs trees. Whenever a checkin occurs, bonsai adds that person to the "hook," a list of those responsible for the current state of the tree (this should be cleared whenever we know that things are working for sure). Users can then run queries to find out who has changed what files and access their checkin comments in addition to generating diffs.

    • Query

      http://tinderbox.perl.org/bonsai/cvsqueryform.cgi?cvsroot=/home/tinder/perlcvs&module=parrot

    • Browse

      http://tinderbox.perl.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/home/tinder/perlcvs&dir=parrot&module=parrot

VERSION

Revision 0.1 - 27 July 2002

Written to prepare for the fallout from TPC 6.