NAME ^

ROADMAP - A plan for Parrot

PURPOSE ^

As of this writing, there is no one place in which all remaining parrot work is documented. There are various TODO files, the RT queue, comments in the source code and the documentation. This document is a first pass at unifying this information and providing a single point of reference for anyone interested in the current state of the parrot, whether they are developers looking for items to work on, or external users looking for an idea of when they can expect a release.

This document is not meant to contain all the metadata regarding particular tasks, but merely provide a summary of the tasks.

This document is now becoming a roadmap, because the Architect is deep in a weeklong mindmeld with the Pumpking and the results are being encoded in this document, among others.

For a high level overview of parrot milestones, please see: http://www.perlfoundation.org/gc/grants/2005-p6-proposal.html

CURRENT RELEASE (0.4.0) ^

Parrot 0.4.0 was released on Dec. 4th, 2005. For a list of new and fixed feature see NEWS.

OVERVIEW ^

The remaining tasks are broken down into the following categories, roughly listed in the order through which a task might progress.

METADATA ^

Each task has certain metadata associated with it which must be tracked. Eventually all metadata should be stored in RT at https://rt.perl.org/rt3/

DESIGN ^

These are pending design decisions which must be made before any code can be written to implement them. Note - DESIGN is a special kind of documentation task, but due to the nature of this kind of documentation, it deserves to be broken out into its own category.

TODO ^

Any item, whether visible to parrot users or hidden behind an API, that has already been designed (but not implemented) belongs here.

BUGFIX ^

Any items which have been implemented but don't work as expected.

PORTABILITY ^

Any items which are specific to a particular platform or require special attention for cross-platform compatibility.

DOCUMENTATION ^

Any items pertaining to source, API, or user level documentation.

HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGES ^

Parrot currently ships with several partial language implementations. Any tasks which are specific to those languages, or affect cross-language compatibility will be listed here.

ISSUES ^

METADATA ^

DOCUMENTATION ^

DESIGN ^

TODO ^

BUGFIX ^

PORTABILITY ^

HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGES ^

FUTURE ^

This document should eventually be obsoleted by use of the RT ticketing system, except to the extent that it documents things that show promise but have not yet been committed to. Every task that is actually ready to be done should be documented in RT, and reports generated based on that information.

BUGS (in this document) ^

As for the future development, it has been pointed out that RT is not the best system for handling such things (though it does have the advantage of being available). The main point is to have single point of contact to help volunteers check (and update) the status of issues important to them.


parrot