GSoC Day 0 Report

My summer of code project officially begins on Monday, May 26th. My project is to flesh out the Perl6 Test Suite. The test suite is in the Pugs SVN repository: http://svn.pugscode.org/pugs/t/. I am focusing on improving the specification part of the test suite, which stored under the pugs/t/spec directory.

Two weeks ago, I installed Fedora 9 (64bit with KDE4), which included Perl 5.10.0. For my personal programming projects, I use Subversion and SVK, so I already had those in place. This past week, I attempted to build the current version of Pugs and failed. I plan to use feather's build of Pugs for testing instead. I just built the latest Rakudo, since yesterday's build didn't work. I also have elf running, mncharity's Perl 6 interpreter/compiler that runs in Perl 5.

Elf is an interesting project that is being developed very rapidly. This week, I patched evalbot (living in pugs/misc/evalbot) to run elf. Elf only requires Perl 5, some Perl modules, and Ruby 1.9 (a testing version). I assisted moritz (who is also my mentor) with getting elf running in the evalbot for #perl6 yesterday. Evalbot is also a nice way to test things and get opinions on code at the same time.

Speaking of IRC channels, I'm mainly active in #perl6 on irc.freenode.net. I'm also in #perl6-soc (also on Freenode), and #parrot and #psoc (both on irc.perl.org). As Jerry Gay noted in an email, moritz, myself, and others will be meeting in #perl6-soc on Freenode on Wednesdays at 1930UTC. These meetings are 30 minutes before the weekly Perl6 conference call an hour before the Parrot design meetings, and logs are available at http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6-soc/today. I like the speed at which we decided this: 25 minutes from start to having a logger in the channel. Other than the SoC mailing lists, I'm subscribed to the perl6-language and perl6-compiler lists.

For the curious, you can watch my commits here on moritz's site.

Finally, I got a head start on my project yesterday after I added elf to evalbot and wrote 10 test cases for Synopsis 11. This took me a few hours, but much of that was spent experimenting with the Test module, the various implementations, and asking basic questions. Moritz and a few others were very helpful in guiding me. It appears that my smartlinks didn't work, so investigating those will be next on my to do list.

Update: Previously I incorrectly said that my IRC meetings were an hour before ParrotSketch. Instead, they are 30 minutes before the Perl6 Design Conference Call.