The OpenNET Project / Index page

[ новости /+++ | форум | теги | ]

Интерактивная система просмотра системных руководств (man-ов)

 ТемаНаборКатегория 
 
 [Cписок руководств | Печать]

perlhack (1)
  • >> perlhack (1) ( Solaris man: Команды и прикладные программы пользовательского уровня )
  • perlhack (1) ( Разные man: Команды и прикладные программы пользовательского уровня )
  • 
    
    

    NAME

         perlhack - How to hack at the Perl internals
    
    
    

    DESCRIPTION

         This document attempts to explain how Perl development takes
         place, and ends with some suggestions for people wanting to
         become bona fide porters.
    
         The perl5-porters mailing list is where the Perl standard
         distribution is maintained and developed.  The list can get
         anywhere from 10 to 150 messages a day, depending on the
         heatedness of the debate.  Most days there are two or three
         patches, extensions, features, or bugs being discussed at a
         time.
    
         A searchable archive of the list is at:
    
             http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/
    
         The list is also archived under the usenet group name
         `perl.porters-gw' at:
    
             http://www.deja.com/
    
         List subscribers (the porters themselves) come in several
         flavours.  Some are quiet curious lurkers, who rarely pitch
         in and instead watch the ongoing development to ensure
         they're forewarned of new changes or features in Perl.  Some
         are representatives of vendors, who are there to make sure
         that Perl continues to compile and work on their platforms.
         Some patch any reported bug that they know how to fix, some
         are actively patching their pet area (threads, Win32, the
         regexp engine), while others seem to do nothing but
         complain.  In other words, it's your usual mix of technical
         people.
    
         Over this group of porters presides Larry Wall.  He has the
         final word in what does and does not change in the Perl
         language.  Various releases of Perl are shepherded by a
         ``pumpking'', a porter responsible for gathering patches,
         deciding on a patch-by-patch feature-by-feature basis what
         will and will not go into the release.  For instance,
         Gurusamy Sarathy is the pumpking for the 5.6 release of
         Perl.
    
         In addition, various people are pumpkings for different
         things.  For instance, Andy Dougherty and Jarkko Hietaniemi
         share the Configure pumpkin, and Tom Christiansen is the
         documentation pumpking.
    
         Larry sees Perl development along the lines of the US
         government:  there's the Legislature (the porters), the
         Executive branch (the pumpkings), and the Supreme Court
         (Larry).  The legislature can discuss and submit patches to
         the executive branch all they like, but the executive branch
         is free to veto them.  Rarely, the Supreme Court will side
         with the executive branch over the legislature, or the
         legislature over the executive branch.  Mostly, however, the
         legislature and the executive branch are supposed to get
         along and work out their differences without impeachment or
         court cases.
    
         You might sometimes see reference to Rule 1 and Rule 2.
         Larry's power as Supreme Court is expressed in The Rules:
    
         1   Larry is always by definition right about how Perl
             should behave.  This means he has final veto power on
             the core functionality.
    
         2   Larry is allowed to change his mind about any matter at
             a later date, regardless of whether he previously
             invoked Rule 1.
    
         Got that?  Larry is always right, even when he was wrong.
         It's rare to see either Rule exercised, but they are often
         alluded to.
    
         New features and extensions to the language are contentious,
         because the criteria used by the pumpkings, Larry, and other
         porters to decide which features should be implemented and
         incorporated are not codified in a few small design goals as
         with some other languages.  Instead, the heuristics are
         flexible and often difficult to fathom.  Here is one
         person's list, roughly in decreasing order of importance, of
         heuristics that new features have to be weighed against:
    
         Does concept match the general goals of Perl?
             These haven't been written anywhere in stone, but one
             approximation is:
    
              1. Keep it fast, simple, and useful.
              2. Keep features/concepts as orthogonal as possible.
              3. No arbitrary limits (platforms, data sizes, cultures).
              4. Keep it open and exciting to use/patch/advocate Perl everywhere.
              5. Either assimilate new technologies, or build bridges to them.
    
    
         Where is the implementation?
             All the talk in the world is useless without an
             implementation.  In almost every case, the person or
             people who argue for a new feature will be expected to
             be the ones who implement it.  Porters capable of coding
             new features have their own agendas, and are not
             available to implement your (possibly good) idea.
    
         Backwards compatibility
             It's a cardinal sin to break existing Perl programs.
             New warnings are contentious--some say that a program
             that emits warnings is not broken, while others say it
             is.  Adding keywords has the potential to break
             programs, changing the meaning of existing token
             sequences or functions might break programs.
    
         Could it be a module instead?
             Perl 5 has extension mechanisms, modules and XS,
             specifically to avoid the need to keep changing the Perl
             interpreter.  You can write modules that export
             functions, you can give those functions prototypes so
             they can be called like built-in functions, you can even
             write XS code to mess with the runtime data structures
             of the Perl interpreter if you want to implement really
             complicated things.  If it can be done in a module
             instead of in the core, it's highly unlikely to be
             added.
    
         Is the feature generic enough?
             Is this something that only the submitter wants added to
             the language, or would it be broadly useful?  Sometimes,
             instead of adding a feature with a tight focus, the
             porters might decide to wait until someone implements
             the more generalized feature.  For instance, instead of
             implementing a ``delayed evaluation'' feature, the
             porters are waiting for a macro system that would permit
             delayed evaluation and much more.
    
         Does it potentially introduce new bugs?
             Radical rewrites of large chunks of the Perl interpreter
             have the potential to introduce new bugs.  The smaller
             and more localized the change, the better.
    
         Does it preclude other desirable features?
             A patch is likely to be rejected if it closes off future
             avenues of development.  For instance, a patch that
             placed a true and final interpretation on prototypes is
             likely to be rejected because there are still options
             for the future of prototypes that haven't been
             addressed.
    
         Is the implementation robust?
             Good patches (tight code, complete, correct) stand more
             chance of going in.  Sloppy or incorrect patches might
             be placed on the back burner until the pumpking has time
             to fix, or might be discarded altogether without further
             notice.
    
         Is the implementation generic enough to be portable?
             The worst patches make use of a system-specific
             features.  It's highly unlikely that nonportable
             additions to the Perl language will be accepted.
    
         Is there enough documentation?
             Patches without documentation are probably ill-thought
             out or incomplete.  Nothing can be added without
             documentation, so submitting a patch for the appropriate
             manpages as well as the source code is always a good
             idea.  If appropriate, patches should add to the test
             suite as well.
    
         Is there another way to do it?
             Larry said ``Although the Perl Slogan is There's More
             Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do
             something''.  This is a tricky heuristic to navigate,
             though--one man's essential addition is another man's
             pointless cruft.
    
         Does it create too much work?
             Work for the pumpking, work for Perl programmers, work
             for module authors, ...  Perl is supposed to be easy.
    
         Patches speak louder than words
             Working code is always preferred to pie-in-the-sky
             ideas.  A patch to add a feature stands a much higher
             chance of making it to the language than does a random
             feature request, no matter how fervently argued the
             request might be.  This ties into ``Will it be
             useful?'', as the fact that someone took the time to
             make the patch demonstrates a strong desire for the
             feature.
    
         If you're on the list, you might hear the word ``core''
         bandied around.  It refers to the standard distribution.
         ``Hacking on the core'' means you're changing the C source
         code to the Perl interpreter.  ``A core module'' is one that
         ships with Perl.
    
         The source code to the Perl interpreter, in its different
         versions, is kept in a repository managed by a revision
         control system (which is currently the Perforce program, see
         http://perforce.com/).  The pumpkings and a few others have
         access to the repository to check in changes.  Periodically
         the pumpking for the development version of Perl will
         release a new version, so the rest of the porters can see
         what's changed.  The current state of the main trunk of
         repository, and patches that describe the individual changes
         that have happened since the last public release are
         available at this location:
    
             ftp://ftp.linux.activestate.com/pub/staff/gsar/APC/
    
         Selective parts are also visible via the rsync protocol.  To
         get all the individual changes to the mainline since the
         last development release, use the following command:
    
             rsync -avuz rsync://ftp.linux.activestate.com/perl-diffs perl-diffs
    
         Use this to get the latest source tree in full:
    
             rsync -avuz rsync://ftp.linux.activestate.com/perl-current perl-current
    
         Needless to say, the source code in perl-current is usually
         in a perpetual state of evolution.  You should expect it to
         be very buggy.  Do not use it for any purpose other than
         testing and development.
    
         Always submit patches to perl5-porters@perl.org.  This lets
         other porters review your patch, which catches a surprising
         number of errors in patches.  Either use the diff program
         (available in source code form from
         ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/), or use Johan Vromans' makepatch
         (available from CPAN/authors/id/JV/).  Unified diffs are
         preferred, but context diffs are accepted.  Do not send
         RCS-style diffs or diffs without context lines.  More
         information is given in the Porting/patching.pod file in the
         Perl source distribution.  Please patch against the latest
         development version (e.g., if you're fixing a bug in the
         5.005 track, patch against the latest 5.005_5x version).
         Only patches that survive the heat of the development branch
         get applied to maintenance versions.
    
         Your patch should update the documentation and test suite.
    
         To report a bug in Perl, use the program perlbug which comes
         with Perl (if you can't get Perl to work, send mail to the
         address perlbug@perl.com or perlbug@perl.org).  Reporting
         bugs through perlbug feeds into the automated bug-tracking
         system, access to which is provided through the web at
         http://bugs.perl.org/.  It often pays to check the archives
         of the perl5-porters mailing list to see whether the bug
         you're reporting has been reported before, and if so whether
         it was considered a bug.  See above for the location of the
         searchable archives.
    
         The CPAN testers (http://testers.cpan.org/) are a group of
         volunteers who test CPAN modules on a variety of platforms.
         Perl Labs (http://labs.perl.org/) automatically tests Perl
         source releases on platforms and gives feedback to the CPAN
         testers mailing list.  Both efforts welcome volunteers.
    
         To become an active and patching Perl porter, you'll need to
         learn how Perl works on the inside.  Chip Salzenberg, a
         pumpking, has written articles on Perl internals for The
         Perl Journal (http://www.tpj.com/) which explain how various
         parts of the Perl interpreter work.  The `perlguts' manpage
         explains the internal data structures.  And, of course, the
         C source code (sometimes sparsely commented, sometimes
         commented well) is a great place to start (begin with
         `perl.c' and see where it goes from there).  A lot of the
         style of the Perl source is explained in the
         Porting/pumpkin.pod file in the source distribution.
    
         It is essential that you be comfortable using a good
         debugger (e.g. gdb, dbx) before you can patch perl.
         Stepping through perl as it executes a script is perhaps the
         best (if sometimes tedious) way to gain a precise
         understanding of the overall architecture of the language.
    
         If you build a version of the Perl interpreter with
         `-DDEBUGGING', Perl's -D command line flag will cause
         copious debugging information to be emitted (see the
         `perlrun' manpage).  If you build a version of Perl with
         compiler debugging information (e.g. with the C compiler's
         `-g' option instead of `-O') then you can step through the
         execution of the interpreter with your favourite C symbolic
         debugger, setting breakpoints on particular functions.
    
         It's a good idea to read and lurk for a while before
         chipping in.  That way you'll get to see the dynamic of the
         conversations, learn the personalities of the players, and
         hopefully be better prepared to make a useful contribution
         when do you speak up.
    
         If after all this you still think you want to join the
         perl5-porters mailing list, send mail to perl5-porters-
         subscribe@perl.org.  To unsubscribe, send mail to
         perl5-porters-unsubscribe@perl.org.
    
    
    

    AUTHOR

         This document was written by Nathan Torkington, and is
         maintained by the perl5-porters mailing list.
    
    
    
    


    Поиск по тексту MAN-ов: 




    Партнёры:
    PostgresPro
    Inferno Solutions
    Hosting by Hoster.ru
    Хостинг:

    Закладки на сайте
    Проследить за страницей
    Created 1996-2024 by Maxim Chirkov
    Добавить, Поддержать, Вебмастеру