Hi Michal,
there is a lot in your mail that i'd like to make
some comments on. But I'd rather wait until
we meet at some sprint to discuss some of that :-)
On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 13:36 -0400, Michal Wallace wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Sep 2005, holger krekel wrote:
> Lowering the cost of participating in pypy won't
> put any money in your pockets, but if the goal of
> the money is to have more man hours put into developing
> pypy (and I don't know what the goal is, but that is
> my guess) then there are many other ways you can get
> more smart people working on it.
It's also a matter of good timing to bring more people
into the project. For example, the Paris sprint is
a quite good opportunity because we are heading
for new stuff there where people can get involved
and being helped in a more focused way.
> For example, I clicked on "issues" on the pypy site.
> Turns out these are not just issues, but also a sort
> of "to-do" list. Are any of these things that a newbie
> could do without going to a sprint?
The default issue tracker view separates issues into "easy",
"medium" and "hard" to tackle and displays the easiest ones
first.
> Maybe with some guidance. For example, to take an issue
> at random...
>
> #118 : "pickling of ll flowgraphs"
That's a 'medium' issue and thus not really suited
for newcomers.
> I'm sure to you guys, pickling of ll flowgraphs makes
> a lot of sense. But to me as an outsider, I'm not sure
> what it means. Does ll mean llvm or low level? And what
> prevents you from pickling it? Can you write a test case
> that would pass if pickling ll flowgraphs worked?
I agree that it's good to try to describe issues
assuming as few pre-knowledge as possible.
> To an outsider like me, PyPy works by genius-level
> black magic. So if I wanted to help out and get
> ll flowgraph pickles working, I'd have a huge
> learning curve. I also don't know if it's really
> important or not.
OK. But aren't there also a number of issues where it's not
so hard to guess about their usefulness?
> ...
> So what I'm saying is that it's difficult for people
> to pick up pypy. The impression is that you have to
> wait for a sprint and then go to europe if you want
> to help out. So I imagine that recruiting help is
> very expensive in terms of time.
>
> The point, then, is that one way to reach your goals
> without needing people to give you more money is to
> make it easier for people to give you their *time*.
Sure. We actively mentor (or at least try to) new people and
i hold that our documentation is not the worst. The fact is that
writing a full Python interpreter implementation and a full
compiler are - by themselves - not trivial tasks. Add some
challenging goals (including making the EU project part
of the project work) to that and you have current PyPy :-)
> I'm working on a similar problem for pirate and
> at my own company, and I'd be willing to help
> with making the to-do list more approachable to
> newbies if you guys are interested.
you are welcome! Going over the to-do list and
adding useful information (maybe grabbed from someone
at IRC) could certainly help.
cheers,
holger
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