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