Only a little over a week left until 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.
Allison will be the release manager for the 1.0 release, and has asked for some help from testers and developers.
There's been a lot of discussion on list and IRC in the past few weeks about versions 1.0 and beyond. The results of this discussion have been captured by allison and put into an updated 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
A few highlights...
- http://docs.parrot.org now has a front page. Infinoid has been working on cleaning up the various parrot web sites.
- Traces and backtraces now show code annotations.
- optimized builds on amd64 now work thanks to adougherty and rurban.
- smolder reports now attach more data.
- Many more languages that have nested with parrot for some time are now taking flight
- fperrad built a CHM from parrot's 0.9.1 documentation and added make rules to make it easy to generate for each release.
- pmichaud wants to keep languages working when we cut parrot releases, especially now that they're moving out of our repository.
Stats
- Active issues in trac: 195 (up from 185).
- Active issues in RT: 445 (down from 446).
- Commits to parrot in the last week: 157.
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.
- The weekly developer meeting on IRC in #parrotsketch on irc.parrot.org. (Tuesdays)
- The daily chatter on IRC in #parrot, also on irc.parrot.org
- The parrot-dev mailing list.
- The Trac timeline, which includes bug reports, svn commits, and wiki updates.
This summary cobbled together by Will "Coke" Coleda.