Request for help: Updating the Squaak tutorial

[Jonathan Leto]

Howdy,

Firstly, thanks for working on this Tyler, it is sorely needed.

My advice is to not worry about git-svn and just worry about the
content of the tutorial. You can
use a plain old diff and patch to apply the updated tutorial as a
single commit, which should be
fine. Since the release is on Tuesday, it would probably be best to
get this applied by Monday
night or so.

I am of the opinion that even if you don't finish updating the entire
tutorial, it would still be useful
to apply what you have before the release and add a note that the rest
of the tutorial is still being
brought up-to-date.

Duke


On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Tyler Curtis <tyler.l.curtis at gmail.com> wrote:
> Parrot's 2.6 release is coming up this Tuesday, and I've been put in
> charge of getting the Squaak tutorial up-to-date. The Squaak tutorial
> is a tutorial for creating a compiler from a high-level language to
> Parrot that has unfortunately become rather outdated. You can find it
> in its current state at
> http://docs.parrot.org/parrot/latest/html/PCT_Tutorial.html . I have
> my partially-updated version at
> http://github.com/ekiru/squaak-tutorial currently.
>
> The reasons that make it so out-of-date is that it is a tutorial for
> creating compilers using PGE(variously referred to as either the Perl
> or Parrot Grammar Engine), an old implementation of Perl 6's regexes
> and grammars, and an old version of Not Quite Perl. At the time the
> tutorial was written, this was the "standard" way to develop HLL
> compilers for Parrot, but this is no longer the case. Since then, NQP
> has gained a regex engine of its own(which is why it is now called
> NQP-rx, where the rx refers to its implementation of Perl 6's
> regexes), and NQP-rx has become the preferred tool for creating both
> the parser and the code-generator of HLL compilers. In addition, the
> specification of Perl 6 regexes has changed over time; PGE's
> implementation has not continued to keep up with the spec; NQP's regex
> engine, however, has. In order to make it easier for Parrot's users to
> create new HLL compilers, I want to update the tutorial to
>
> I've already mostly finished updating the first four Episodes of the
> tutorial and part of the the fifth. I welcome anyone at all to help
> with what remains(and would be very grateful if someone did). Just
> respond to this email or contact me on IRC(my nick is tcurtis) with
> your github username if you want a commit bit to the github
> repository.
>
> An important task for a committer with more knowledge of git-svn than
> I is to import my changes from the git repo into the SVN repository in
> a branch. I initially had it in git because I didn't want to modify it
> in trunk and I didn't want to create a svn branch for something I
> wasn't sure I was going to actually get around to working on. Now it's
> still there because I broke my install of the Perl SVN bindings, which
> means that git-svn doesn't work for me. Although I could certainly
> just copy the updated files into SVN, it would be much better if
> someone can use git-svn to import the history of those changes
> somehow.
>
> My goal is to have the tutorial updated and merged into Parrot's svn
> trunk before the 2.6 release Tuesday. Please help make this happen.
>
> P.S. I'm also going to be submitting this to Perlmonks and bringing it
> to the attention of #perl6 in an attempt to get some people who aren't
> yet involved in Parrot development to get involved.
>
> --
> Tyler Curtis
> _______________________________________________
> http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
>



-- 
Jonathan "Duke" Leto
jonathan at leto.net
http://leto.net