I asked for some ideas about topics to write about for this advent calendar thing, and PerlJam (Perl hacker and long-time Parrot ecosystem contributor and well-wisher) suggested I devote a post to how to contribute to Parrot. Say no more! I think it’s an excellent idea for a second post. This, the second day of my lazy, late pseudo-advent calendar for Parrot will be devoted to contributions.
In the olden-days of Parrot, like last year, we used SVN. These were dark and dangerous times when new contributors were forced to submit their proposed changes in patch files via email. There was much weeping and gnashing of teeth. However, we finally made the switch not only to version control with git but also hosting with github. Now contributing to Parrot or any of its many ecosystem projects is a snap. Create a fork of the repository you want to contribute to, make your edits and commit them, and then open a github pull request. It’s so easy, you’re going to be wishing you started doing it earlier. Seriously, what are you waiting for?
If you submit enough cool changes, we’ll probably do one or both of the following:
- Ask you to add your name to CREDITS, so you can get MAD PROPZ for everybody to see.
- Give you a commit bit to the repo because seriously, you’re doing too much awesome work and we don’t want to have to play intermediaries between you and the code.
We may also try to rope you into doing other stuff, like being one of our monthly release managers (looks great on a resume, especially if you’re entry-level), writing blog posts, mentoring GSoC and GCI students, and writing even more awesome code. If you ever read the book The Giving Tree, it’s kind of like that except everybody wins and the ending is much happier.
Parrot is a relatively rare kind of project because we have so much happening at so many levels of abstraction. If you’re a nuts and bolts kind of coder and like doing stuff “on the metal”, we have plenty of internals work that needs doing: Threading and Concurrency, Garbage Collection, Object Model, and more optimizations than you can shake a stick at. If you’re more of a middle-ware person we have lots of libraries and infrastructure projects to work on. Then we have HLL compilers like Rakudo that need help and finally end-user code and programs written in those HLLs.
Want to write games? We have xlib and opengl bindings available. Sure they may need a little bit of love, but we have them and they work very well.
Like compilers? We have a handful in development and are always looking for more. Winxed is a fun and familiar (For C++ and Java lovers) systems language. I’m working on a new bootstrapped JavaScript compiler. In the past we’ve had Ruby, Python and Tcl compilers under development, and things
Like Perl6? RAKUDO RAKUDO RAKUDO! Also, Rakudo.
Like writing documentation or making cool new websites to hold our docs? We need you! We’ve got lots of documentation that we need to expose to the users better, and we are missing lots of documentation that needs to be written. Also, since code is changing at a break-neck pace we need to update all the docs we have.
If you like solving problems, fixing bugs or implementing cool new code then we have tons of jobs for you! Sign up for a free account on Github if you don’t have one already. Search around the various Parrot repositories or search for “Parrot” to find a repository you want to hack on. Create a fork and get to work! If you want to contribute to a particular project or particular type of project and aren’t sure where or how is the best place, come talk to us and we’ll try to get you pointed in the right direction.
Speaking of talking to us, there are three good ways to get into contact with us Parrot folks, if you want to chat: IRC (#parrot on irc.parrot.org), The parrot-dev email list (parrot-dev at lists.parrot.org) or in comments and pull requests on github. Leave a comment on this blog too, and I’ll help you personally.
Parrot is a big open-source project with lots of work to be done at every level of abstraction. We’re always looking for new contributions and new contributors. If you’re interested in getting involved, don’t hesitate to get in contact with us and start writing some great code.