There is a lot of interest in Node, and a lot of work to do. Several of you have asked me lately how you can help in IRC and in person.
In order to try to help match up the interest with the work, I'm going to start occasionally making requests for help in specific areas where I think improvements need to be made. In the past, these kinds of calls have been very productive. You don't need permission. Just play around with the problem, and if you make some headway, share it with the rest of the group. If you find it's something you really can get excited about, then maybe it can be your thing :) A very problematic area right now is binary module compilation across platforms, especially on Windows. In the past, we've deployed a node-waf program, which is a lightly-customized fork of the "waf" build tool. This program has worked ok, but it is fundamentally non-portable, and my hope is that it will not have to be in 0.8. In the node source tree is a file called tools/gyp_addon. You can use this to generate either a Makefile, or the appropriate MS Visual C stuff to build an addon. There are some examples in test/addons/, but the whole process is not very well documented, and requires a lot of manual tweaking. To make matters even more hairy, there are a bunch of node programs floating around in the wild that are using node-waf. We need to make it as easy as possible to port these to a better future. The goal: There should be a standalone `npm install addon-gyp-toolchain -g` or something (probably ought to pick a better name) that sets up some scripts. If you have this toolchain installed, we'll assume that you also have "make" on unix, and Visual Studio on Windows. If you then run the appropriate command in a project directory, it'll build an addon using whichever method is appropriate for the current system. Once such a thing is in place, and it works reliably on Windows and Unix, and is pretty easy and generalized, start making pull requests to everybody to replace their wscripts with a gyp file. The most important thing is that it makes the process easier than it is today. There's probably more API design, debugging, and picking through bits, than actually writing new code. And, of course, it could be that my vision of this is way off. Your task should be to make it easier to compile a bunch of C code into a .node addon file in a way that works on Windows and Unix, and doesn't completely suck. Don't be afraid to get creative. Why not just deploy gyp_addon with node? Because that would be recreating the node-waf experience, which is terrible. This is a step towards binary deployments (at least for operating systems and platforms that can do such things reliably). It would not be terrible to install it when node is configured with --debug or something, but by default the msi and pkg installers should never include gyp. Users who *want* install-time compilation will always be able to do this by installing the toolchain and then opting out of binary builds. Thanks for your help.
