The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 19 December 2007. Allison, Patrick, Jerry, Flavio, Richard, and chromatic attended.
Patrick:
- the new perl6 compiler now passes all of the 01-sanity tests again
- so it's not the new perl6 compiler
- it is now just the perl6 compiler
- the number of patch submitters is also increasing
- Jonathan Worthington added in a preliminary implementation of junctions, with no prompting from anyone
- he also added in hash subscripts and a few other things with minimal prompting
- Flavio Glock submitted a patch for
BEGIN blocks
- I'm pleased with the way the new compiler is structured
- it appears easy for other people to add things
- next up is working on the test suite
- also writing more documentation on how the compiler works and how the pieces fit together
- helped Jerry get Punie running, at least behind the scenes
- a few little things here and there
- I look forward to getting more done this week
Jerry:
- made Punie run on PCT for the 20th anniversary
- Jeff Horwitz made Perl 1 and Perl 6 run in Apache via mod_parrot
Patrick:
- 20 years of Perl has brought us mod_punie
Jerry:
- I improved some Parrot error messages to make life easier
- concentrating now on getting Test.pm running so that we can use the Pugs test suite
c:
- fixed some bugs in the tests, to try to help the release go more smoothly
- hope to remove a bunch of removable deprecated stuff
- tried to remove src/objects.c, but there were a couple of used things in there
- had a discussion with Adam Kennedy about making a
perl6 binary, probably with the pbc2c utility and installing the PBC files appropriately
- seems like a nice little afternoon's diversion
- could even make a package for it for Debian or something
Richard:
- I had cake
- devoting my efforts into two places
- the chaotic maelstrom which is the Perl 5.10 press release
- we'll converge on a solution for that shortly
- the other bit has been doing some donation prospecting, planning, and contact
Patrick:
- is anyone writing a report from the recent Chicago Hackathon?
Richard:
- I haven't had any contact with them
Allison:
- finished up the Events implementation
- plan to enable it today
- finished a draft of the MMD PDD; I'll commit that shortly
Flavio:
- started talking with Patrick about implementing some things that kp6 needs
- we want to bootstrap kp6 on Parrot
- we could run it on P6 on Parrot, then use it to compile itself
- we ran into some problems, but Patrick is looking into them
- also working on kp6 on Perl 5
- bootstrapping will be difficult there, because the speed is so low
- we have alternate options
- perhaps we could make it work over Moose
- then we have to give up on some features
Patrick:
- I sent a message about the
eval problem we may have
- I'm starting to look at running the Pugs tests
- they need a lot of reorganization
- many of the tests use
eval to do things that we don't need eval to do
- I can't tell if they're necessary, or if someone threw it in there because they could
- I don't want to interfere too much with what Pugs is relying on
Flavio:
- the main reason for
eval was to work around errors that prevented the tests from running
- I think it's okay to remove
- maybe add some
eval extra tests just in case
- if it's testing
eval, not just the actual test
c:
- I agree completely
- I'd hate to break the tests for Pugs though, especially if there aren't people hacking on the Haskell core often
Flavio:
Patrick:
- expecting
eval to work early on seems like kind of a stretch for a new implementation
Allison:
- using it to protect yourself from code that doesn't parse, for example
Patrick:
- right
- also looking for a way to mark tests as TODO for various tests
- we looked at a way of using smart comments for that
- Larry had an idea about that
c:
- seems like a data-driven test
- much like the Parrot tests driven by Perl 5
- you could do that for just the minimum features necessary to catch parse fails
Patrick:
- I'll try the comment approach for now and see how it works for Perl 6 on Parrot
- might generalize later
- is the current subdirectory organization of the tests in Pugs decent, or does it need reorganization?
- I find myself looking through various places for the right tests
- I don't know if that's me or not
- maybe organizing them by Synopsis makes sense
Jerry:
- I agree
- test reorganization has been on the list of things we've wanted to do for a while
- people are available
- we haven't had a direction for that yet
Flavio:
- many tests were added randomly
- there's a site that links tests to the specification
- but moving around the tests won't break the documentation, so it's okay
Patrick:
- we could merely duplicate them for a while
- keep track of the duplicates
- then that site could switch over to the new ones
Flavio:
- you can just move them around
- you don't have to ask permission
- might be good to start with a stripped-down Test.pm and then an advanced one
Patrick:
- we have an intermediate one
- maybe we can segregate tests based on which module we can use
Flavio:
- any thoughts on logging the #parrot channel?
Allison:
- we discuss that once in a while
Patrick:
- I remember people had concerns about that
Allison:
- mostly I just run
screen
- no call next week
- let's plan to talk on the 2nd then
