[psoc-2008] [report] Day-0 Report - Adrian

[Adrian Kreher]

(This is also on my blog at 
http://auzon.blogspot.com/2008/05/gsoc-day-0-report.html)

My summer of code project officially begins on Monday, May 26th. My project is 
to flesh out the Perl6 Test Suite 
(http://code.google.com/soc/2008/perl/appinfo.html?csaid=D52E2C1E79E3F5F6). 
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 
(http://feather.perl6.nl/) 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 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 
(http://moritz.faui2k3.org/svn-search/search.pl?q=author%3Aauzon)

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.

--
Adrian Kreher