How you can help

We're looking for programmers of all skill levels, all backgrounds, and all areas of expertise to help out. Maybe you're a whiz at LWP, or Catalyst, or Perl::Critic. Perhaps you've got a strong background in C, or you're a PHP programmer looking to see what Perl is about. No matter who you are, there's a Perl-related project that can use your help!

Most projects have needs beyond just coding the core codeset. Maybe you can:

Write automated tests
Act as triage for bugs in the RT bug queue
Write documentation
Proofread existing documentation
Update the project's website
Test code on different platforms
Translate messages to other natural languages
Write a press release to help PR for the Perl Foundation

Projects we know about now

The exact projects that we'll be working on depend on who shows up, but here are some likely candidates. If you'd like your project listed here, email a short paragraph about it to andy@perl.org.

Perl 6 & Parrot

Perl 6 is the next release of Perl 5, and is quite an undertaking. Parrot is the virtual machine that underlies Perl 6, and will allow other languages to run on top of it.

Chip Salzenberg, the pumpking for Parrot, will be at the hackathon to organize this effort. We've got a laundry list of tasks, include

Working as a group on one subsystem to be named later, e.g. I/O or exceptions
C code cleanups
Name standardization
Function call overhauling
Fix C namespace pollution to make Parrot clean for embedding
Adding tests
Automatic code generation
Static code analysis with lint and splint
Dynamic code analysis with valgrind and other testing tools
Improve test coverage
Other Parrot Cage Cleaners work

Perl 5 tests

Steve Peters has been doing a yeoman's job of closing Perl bug tickets, but, as he notes:

There have been many times where bugs were fixed, but the bug reports stayed open because there was no test case to add to the Perl core. I'll be working to convert as many bug reports as possible into test cases and add them back to the Perl core. I'm also hoping to fix a few of the bugs along the way, combine duplicate reports, and otherwise clean up the bug queue even further than my previous work has done.

This is a great example of a project where anyone can help, because much of it is testing and rerunning test cases, peperhaps on multiple platforms, with little or no coding involved. It will also be a great learning experience.

HTML::Tidy

HTML::Tidy is a wrapper around the libtidy validation and cleanup library. It needs some serious attention to increase the access to the inherent capabilities of libtidy. If you know C and XS, this could be the one for you.

Perl::Critic

Perl::Critic is an extensible framework for creating and applying coding standards to Perl source code. Essentially, it is a static source code analysis engine, like lint for C. New policies are getting added to Perl::Critic all the time, and you can help your fellow Perl programmers write cleaner, safer code.

and many more

The current project list, along with working documents that the project owners are getting together in preparation for the hackathon, are on the Projects page on the Hackathon wiki.