On Sep 29, 2008, at 4:26 PM, Brice Figureau wrote:
>
>> And assuming this is against 0.24.x (which it should be), then it's
>> James who will be merging it.
>
> Yes, it is against 0.24.x.
> What's the timeframe for 0.24.6?

As James says, next week is likely.  We're on a quarterly release  
schedule now, which would put 0.24.6 out on the 1st, but we're running  
a week or so late, apparently.

>
>>> And then, I'll have to find something else to work on :-)
>>> If there are some things on which I can help, let me know.
>>
>>
>> There are *tons* of things you could help with, at this point.
>>
>> You want more language work, RAL, or what?
>
> I'm quite open, but I don't have tons of spare time (a few hours per
> week-end: my day to day job is taking most of my development time).
> I can do some small things like I already did. Note that there are  
> large
> parts of puppet internals I still don't even know about :-)
> Since I know the parser quite well now, I can continue working on the
> language part if that's related. From the various debugging I already
> did, I know a little bit of the resources, compilation and  
> storeconfigs.
> And I know service providers too.

There are 26 open tickets for the language; my guess is you could  
solve quite a few of them pretty quickly, with your newfound parser  
experience.

Quite a few of them require design decisions -- such as a relationship  
syntax, class dependencies, and class 'confine's -- but many of them  
are relatively simple bugs.

In addition, the language could really use a clean-up refactor and a  
performance refactor.

I've never revisited the design, and I think it could stand some  
redoing.  For instance, the 'each' methods are never actually used (as  
you could tell, since you didn't bother to write tests for the methods  
you created), and I expect there's a much better design available for  
how the AST is built up and evaluated.  Somewhat obviously, this was  
one of the first designs to coalesce, and I've never had time to  
revisit it.

I've also never done performance analysis on the parser, and my  
understanding is that for complex parsing jobs, things get a bit  
expensive.  If you slapped this under profiling or (even better)  
DTrace, I expect just a few hours would yield really good results  
quickly.

If we step outside of the language, I'd say the next biggest  
priorities are testing and the REST/Indirector work for 0.25.

There are quite a few tickets pointing to failing tests, and those all  
need to be fixed, most likely by rewriting the tests in rspec.  We  
also want to get rid of all of the existing tests in test/, and doing  
so is likely to require a decent bit of refactoring in some places  
because a lot of the original code isn't written to be all that  
testable.

There are also quite a few tickets opened with a High priority for  
0.25, pointing to the classes that still need to be converted.  There  
are yet other classes that don't use any xmlrpc but should use the  
indirector/REST, like StoreConfigs -- I'd like to create a Resource  
class that can speak to ActiveRecord but also support other back-ends,  
for instance.  This would make the language's query syntax much more  
flexible, because you could connect it to any arbitrary resource store.

Obviously most of this isn't quite enough to actually get you started,  
but if any of them stand out as something you want to work on, then we  
can work out the details of how to actually do it.

Sound good?

-- 
Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com


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