TWIP - This week in parrot, February 28th, 2009

Welcome to another week of parrot development; we're approaching the initial 1.0 release of the virtual machine. Here are some highlights from the last week of parrot development. For more information, see Sources.

Release Milestones

The current release is parrot 0.9.1, released on February 17th, 2009. See the Release announcement for details.

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

Infrastructure

trac2email is still not fully functional. In the meantime, please continue to use the web interface. Once trac2email is fixed, you'll be able to open and update tickets using parrotbug or your email client.

Development

Some highlights...

  • allison made a bit of progress on building a language from an installed version of parrot. Rakudo can now build and test entirely from an installed parrot. Until recently, a working build directory was required.
  • chromatic is continuing work on the todo/skip test review.
  • cotto is continuing work on RT #48014, which involves changing the guts of many of the builtin PMCs.
  • rurban is continuing on PBC compability issues.
  • docs.parrot.org now has some content, generated from the 0.9.1 release.
  • jkeenan removed the deprecated TQueue PMC.
  • allison and fperrad continued to move more languages out of parrot's repository.
  • pmichaud, with some help from jonathan, fixed a long standing double-free problem with fakecutables. Another case where work for a language (in this case, rakudo) benefits all other languages targetting parrot.

Issue from the Vault

Highlighting, for the third week running, a ticket from June, 2005: RT #36086 - FreeBSD t/op/trans.t failure when running with JIT.

I'm tempted to take up a collection for a bounty to the person who resolves this issue, so I can move on to another one!

Stats

  • Active issues in trac: 185 (up from 175).
  • Active issues in RT: 446 (down from 456).
  • Commits to parrot in the last week: 104.

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. Donations are not tax deductible. (FYI, I'm on the board.)

Sources

To find out more about parrot, you can follow the same resources used to generate this report.

This summary cobbled together by Will "Coke" Coleda.

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