TWIP - This week in parrot, ending February 7th, 2009

This week in parrot; period ending 07 Feb 09

In an effort to ramp up the project's documentation efforts for 1.0, please enjoy "This Week in Parrot".

These articles aren't meant to cover every change that's occurred in parrot in the last week, but to show some highlights for both developers and users, and provide a gateway to more information.

As a special treat, this edition actually covers the two weeks leading up to the 8th of February.

Infrastructure

The svn repository has moved

Parrot was hosted for some time by the perl.org infrastructure, and in the months before the 1.0 release, we have been slowly moving our infrastructure over to parrot.org. The biggest move occurred on January 29th, 2009 as we migrated the parrot svn repository.

The rsync mirrors and tarballs that used to be provided are not currently enabled at the new hosting site, and there are no plans at the moment to ressurect them.

The primary download location for built version of parrot will be parrot.org going forward, as we transition away from CPAN as our primary distribution method.

Rakudo has left the nest

All languages that aren't merely presented as examples are going to leave the parrot repository before the 1.0 release in March; the svn repository move here was an impetus for one of the largest to move out.

As of this writing, there is still a copy of perl6 in the repository, but the project is now officially hosted on github.

http://perlgeek.de/blog-en/perl-6/where-rakudo-lives.writeback

See Languages for up to date locations for all language implementations targeting parrot.

Dual Ticketing Systems

One of the confusing aspects of the migration from perl.org to parrot.org is that the tickets in our old system were not migrated; They still exist, and many of the easy ways to create new tickets are still pointing at the old system.

New issues should be opened in our Trac system, but we have over 500 old issues still in our RT system.

The long term goal is, of course, to have a single ticketing system (Trac), but in the mean time, the development team is trying to resolve the old tickets.

The admins of parrot.org are in the middle of enabling trac2email, which should make it much easier to funnel updates and new reports to the new system. Until then, the web interface is the best way to interact with Trac.

Trac provides some integration with both milestone tracking and the svn repository which hopefully long term will outweigh the cost of the move.

Release Milestones

The next monthly release, expected to be 0.9.1, is due on February 17th, 2009. See the call for action.

The following release, expected to be 1.0, is due on March 17th, 2009. See the vision document

Chromatic published the parrot team's support policy.

Development

As usual, a lot of bug fixes. Some items of note:

  • rurban is working on making bytecode portable across platforms again.
  • allison has cleaned up the string API to be a little more sane. This rewrite is in advance of simon's more invasive updates which are still under development in a branch.
  • Discussion about dealing with the self keyword in PIR, particularly as it relates to vtables, methods, and conversion of simple subroutines to act in that capacity. See the discussion on the mailing list.

Stats

  • Active issues in trac: 158
  • Active issues in RT: 501
  • Commits to parrot in the last two weeks: 491.

Coda

Tuits

If you have tuits to spare to help out parrot, here are some simple points of entry:

  • Setup a scheduled task to build parrot and report back via smolder.
  • Read through the documentation and make sure it makes sense and that the examples work. The documentation exists in several places: primarily in the repository and the trac wiki.
  • Help us close out the old wiki and complete the migration to the wiki in trac.
  • Go through old tickets in RT and verify that the reports still make sense. Can you run the code in question? Does the patch still apply? Is the report against an old copy of parrot that we have a recent smolder report for?

If you can't donate time, but are still interested in the success of the project, you can also consider donating through the parrot foundation. (FYI, I'm on the board.)

Sources

To find out more about parrot, you can follow the same resources I used:

  • The weekly developer meeting on IRC in #parrotsketch on irc.perl.org
  • The daily chatter on IRC in #parrot, also on irc.perl.org
  • The parrot-dev mailing lists.
  • The Trac timeline, which includes bug reports, svn commits, and wiki updates.

This summary written by Will "Coke" Coleda.

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