The Perl 6 design team met by phone on 17 December 2008. Larry, Patrick, Allison, Jerry, Jesse, Nicholas, and chromatic attended.
Jesse:
- chasing for Hague grant reports
Patrick:
- produced a report-in-kind -- I prepared a presentation on it for Richard
Larry:
- finishing up jetlag from my round the world trip
Patrick:
- lots of hacking over the past two weeks, as I missed the call last week
- Rakudo passing on the order of 5170 tests, up by 500 from two weeks ago
- suspect similar rate of improvements over next 2 weeks, modulo vacations
- can now embed PIR directly into Perl 6 functions; one more piece of the puzzle to write the prelude in Perl 6.
Allison:
Patrick:
- it's a quote,
q:PIR { }
- if your code returns anything it becomes the value of that quote
- it's how Perl 6 specifies it
Jerry:
- slightly off, in that Perl 6 uses a capital Q
Patrick:
- we can fix when Jonathan's branch goes in today
- I was cheating - Rakudo was saying that everything capital was a type
- Reduction and some hyperoperators now implemented.
- Array slices, hash slices, list [???] working
- [???] working catch blocks, I think we've just added control exceptions.
- We now have the nil type, so returns work correctly.
- when blocks inside subs work almost completely correctly.
- [???] interpolation fixed up
- Did work on the sort algorithm; put a trial balloon up on specifying
just the value you want to sort on, rather than the comparison operator.
- After Friday the kids go away on Christmas break, so I should get no
interruptions.
Jerry:
- last night gave a couple of lightning talks at the Seattle Perl user group
- one was "New items in Rakudo Perl in 0.8.2" - it definitely took more than 5 minutes. :-)
- committed first draft of S19, the command line interface.
- it's not complete
- I have a few edits pending. Only gotten one or two reviews so far
- would like more eyes on it.
- dealing with Parrot Foundation things.
- trying to set up getting Parrot out of the Rakudo repository, if you want to look at it that way.
Patrick:
- there is a twitter feed http://twitter.com/rakudoperl
- whenever a new feature shows up in Rakudo I Twitter it - it's trivial from IRC.
- you get a running feed, without me needing to stop and write a blog post, or getting bogged down in detail. Blog posts remain for detailed descriptions
Jerry:
- did a couple of blog posts. Will be blogging shortly about S19
- 0.8.2 released. We did miss a couple of roadmap items, which makes me a little concerned
- we can make a bit up, but it still affects things
c:
- fixed a couple of bugs
- reviewed the numbers PDD
- we should definitely use IBM's standard decimal arithmetic library
- my only concern is distribution and the implications on Rakudo
- otherwise, proposed a feature and patch to p5p
Nicholas:
Allison:
- set up the Ubuntu package archive
- not quite automated, but close
- that'll get us better testing from the Ubuntu folks
- they can just enter our package archive in their F
- every one of our updates will appear in their system
- spent a lot of time cleaning up branches
- haven't committed the install branch yet, but have a smaller patch
- also working on the calling conventions branch
- I'm now adding changes one at a time to the new branch in logical units
- commiting those in passing chunks
- started talks about migrating Subversion to parrot.org, probably after the January release
Patrick:
- Rakudo will stay on perl.org
- should I try to stick that in the existing Perl 6 repository
- or would that be a good time to move to Git, considering that Perl 5 is moving to Git?
Allison:
Nicholas:
- it's hosted by Booking.com
- github offered hosting
c:
- seems like doing both at once is useful
Jerry:
- you're coupling migration and tool switching
- how much will that slow people down?
Patrick:
- I don't think it'll slow us down from the people primarily working on it
- it'll happen around the same time as the move anyway
- ideally the Rakudo stuff should move before Parrot does
c:
- I'd like to see instructions on downloading, making local changes, and submitting a patch
Patrick:
- post-January we could take a week of no features
- just documentation
- we need to explain how to get Parrot and such as well
Nicholas:
- productivity is a concern
- the Perl 5 conversion has shown that
- minimizing downtime is important to aim for as well
Jerry:
- it would be nice to have a champion who isn't Patrick
Patrick:
- I might be able to find one of the "Git is the second coming" people on the channel to do that
c:
- I thought it was the first coming
Jerry:
c:
- no, they branch him and commit their own hopes and dreams to him using Git
Patrick:
Nicholas:
- don't forget the perl.org DNS
- it's reasonable to have an A record rakudo.git.perl.org
- you can clone that, but the source can move
- you decouple the name from the repository
Patrick:
- now might be the right time to do this
- because Rakudo is starting to be useful to write useful things
- I planned to post to Rakudo.org and other places
- it might be interesting to solve some of the problems from Microsoft's scripting games
- no one's done Perl 6 solutions for those yet
- good idea/bad idea/landmines?
Jerry:
- the consequences will be that people report bugs and make Rakudo better
Patrick:
- bug reports are highly useful
- they tend to drive our development better than anything else
- I hope that people will solve those problems but not run into showstoppers
- we may be close to that level
- do I have to worry about any IP concerns?
Allison:
- we may not be able to check them into the repository
- but we could check in original code as tests, if you wanted
Patrick:
- I had no idea in mind to collect these anywhere
- just have people post to their blogs "I tried this problem; here's a solution"
- I want to spread out the answers as far as I can
- more people will have a chance to run across them and comment and show how things are really happening
- that will happen sometime this week
Jerry:
- will
make install be a prerequisite to Rakudo leaving the repository?
Patrick:
- I'd like to know what Rakudo will do
- I might do the Tcl approach of "check out into the Parrot repository"
- if it hasn't made much progress in the next couple of weeks, I'll have to do it myself
- getting that target right is more important than the PGE changes
- from a Rakudo perspective, I need to know what it looks like
