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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.

More current information is also available at https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/wiki/NewParrotDeveloperGuide.

Where can I get Parrot?

The above instructions are also on the Parrot website:

http://www.parrot.org/download

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 5.8.0 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:

    % make html

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:

Where can I find the main developer mailing list?

Most of the Parrot-related development discussion occurs on the parrot-dev (previously known as parrot-porters and perl6-internals) mailing list. There are a variety of interfaces to the list:

In addition, there is a mailing list which logs all commits to the Parrot SVN 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.

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. Visit the channel #parrot on the IRC server irc.parrot.org. Alternative IRC servers are irc.rhizomatic.net and irc.pobox.com.

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

See docs/submissions.pod for details.

I've found a bug, what now?

See docs/submissions.pod for details.

What other useful resources are there for developers?

A number of other useful resources that can be found via on the Parrot wiki, located at http://trac.parrot.org/parrot/wiki.