| perlhack - How to hack on Perl |
make test targets
perlhack - How to hack on Perl
This document explains how Perl development works. It includes details about the Perl 5 Porters email list, the Perl repository, the Perlbug bug tracker, patch guidelines, and commentary on Perl development philosophy.
If you just want to submit a single small patch like a pod fix, a test for a bug, comment fixes, etc., it's easy! Here's how:
% git clone git://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git perl
% perldoc pod/perlhack.pod
% ./Configure -des -Dusedevel % make test
Keep hacking until the tests pass.
% git commit -a -m 'Commit message goes here'
Make sure the commit message describes your change in a single sentence. For example, ``Fixed spelling errors in perlhack.pod''.
If your changes are in a single git commit, run the following commands to generate the patch file and attach it to your bug report:
% git format-patch -1 % ./perl -Ilib utils/perlbug -p 0001-*.patch
The perlbug program will ask you a few questions about your email address and the patch you're submitting. Once you've answered them it will submit your patch via email.
If your changes are in multiple commits, generate a patch file for each
one and provide them to perlbug's -p option separated by commas:
% git format-patch -3 % ./perl -Ilib utils/perlbug -p 0001-fix1.patch,0002-fix2.patch,\ > 0003-fix3.patch
When prompted, pick a subject that summarizes your changes.
If you don’t want to be included in the AUTHORS file, just let us know. Otherwise we will take your submission of a patch as permission to credit you in the AUTHORS file.
% git pull % git reset --hard origin/blead % git clean -dxf
If you want to report a bug in Perl, you must use the perlbug command line tool. This tool will ensure that your bug report includes all the relevant system and configuration information.
To browse existing Perl bugs and patches, you can use the web interface at http://rt.perl.org/.
Please check the archive of the perl5-porters list (see below) and/or the bug tracking system before submitting a bug report. Often, you'll find that the bug has been reported already.
You can log in to the bug tracking system and comment on existing bug reports. If you have additional information regarding an existing bug, please add it. This will help the porters fix the bug.
The perl5-porters (p5p) mailing list is where the Perl standard distribution is maintained and developed. The people who maintain Perl are also referred to as the ``Perl 5 Porters'', ``p5p'' or just the ``porters''.
A searchable archive of the list is available at http://markmail.org/search/. There is also an archive at http://archive.develooper.com/perl5-porters@perl.org/.
The perl5-changes mailing list receives a copy of each patch that gets submitted to the maintenance and development branches of the perl repository. See http://lists.perl.org/list/perl5-changes.html for subscription and archive information.
Many porters are also active on the irc://irc.perl.org/#p5p channel. Feel free to join the channel and ask questions about hacking on the Perl core.
All of Perl's source code is kept centrally in a Git repository at perl5.git.perl.org. The repository contains many Perl revisions from Perl 1 onwards and all the revisions from Perforce, the previous version control system.
For much more detail on using git with the Perl repository, please see the perlgit manpage.
You will need a copy of Git for your computer. You can fetch a copy of the repository using the git protocol:
% git clone git://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git perl
This clones the repository and makes a local copy in the perl directory.
If you cannot use the git protocol for firewall reasons, you can also clone via http, though this is much slower:
% git clone http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git perl
You may access the repository over the web. This allows you to browse the tree, see recent commits, subscribe to RSS feeds for the changes, search for particular commits and more. You may access it at http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git. A mirror of the repository is found at https://github.com/Perl/perl5.
You can also choose to use rsync to get a copy of the current source tree for the bleadperl branch and all maintenance branches:
% rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-current . % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.12.x . % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.10.x . % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.8.x . % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.6.x . % rsync -avz rsync://perl5.git.perl.org/perl-5.005xx .
(Add the --delete option to remove leftover files.)
To get a full list of the available sync points:
% rsync perl5.git.perl.org::
If you have a commit bit, please see the perlgit manpage for more details on using git.
If you're planning to do more extensive work than a single small fix, we encourage you to read the documentation below. This will help you focus your work and make your patches easier to incorporate into the Perl source.
If you have a small patch to submit, please submit it via perlbug. You can also send email directly to perlbug@perl.org. Please note that messages sent to perlbug may be held in a moderation queue, so you won't receive a response immediately.
You'll know your submission has been processed when you receive an email from our ticket tracking system. This email will give you a ticket number. Once your patch has made it to the ticket tracking system, it will also be sent to the perl5-porters@perl.org list.
If your patch is related to an already-opened ticket you can also attach your patch to that ticket, without having to use perlbug.
Patches are reviewed and discussed on the p5p list. Simple, uncontroversial patches will usually be applied without any discussion. When the patch is applied, the ticket will be updated and you will receive email. In addition, an email will be sent to the p5p list.
In other cases, the patch will need more work or discussion. That will happen on the p5p list.
You are encouraged to participate in the discussion and advocate for your patch. Sometimes your patch may get lost in the shuffle. It's appropriate to send a reminder email to p5p if no action has been taken in a month. Please remember that the Perl 5 developers are all volunteers, and be polite.
Changes are always applied directly to the main development branch, called ``blead''. Some patches may be backported to a maintenance branch. If you think your patch is appropriate for the maintenance branch (see MAINTENANCE BRANCHES in the perlpolicy manpage), please explain why when you submit it.
If you are submitting a code patch there are several things that you can do to help the Perl 5 Porters accept your patch.
If you used git to check out the Perl source, then using git
format-patch will produce a patch in a style suitable for Perl. The
format-patch command produces one patch file for each commit you
made. If you prefer to send a single patch for all commits, you can
use git diff.
% git checkout blead % git pull % git diff blead my-branch-name
This produces a patch based on the difference between blead and your
current branch. It's important to make sure that blead is up to date
before producing the diff, that's why we call git pull first.
We strongly recommend that you use git if possible. It will make your life easier, and ours as well.
However, if you're not using git, you can still produce a suitable
patch. You'll need a pristine copy of the Perl source to diff against.
The porters prefer unified diffs. Using GNU diff, you can produce a
diff like this:
% diff -Npurd perl.pristine perl.mine
Make sure that you make realclean in your copy of Perl to remove any
build artifacts, or you may get a confusing result.
As you craft each patch you intend to submit to the Perl core, it's important to write a good commit message. This is especially important if your submission will consist of a series of commits.
The first line of the commit message should be a short description without a period. It should be no longer than the subject line of an email, 50 characters being a good rule of thumb.
A lot of Git tools (Gitweb, GitHub, git log --pretty=oneline, ...) will only display the first line (cut off at 50 characters) when presenting commit summaries.
The commit message should include a description of the problem that the patch corrects or new functionality that the patch adds.
As a general rule of thumb, your commit message should help a programmer who knows the Perl core quickly understand what you were trying to do, how you were trying to do it, and why the change matters to Perl.
If you're deprecating a feature with the intent of later simplifying another bit of code, say so. If you're fixing a performance problem or adding a new feature to support some other bit of the core, mention that.
A commit message isn't intended to take the place of comments in your code. Commit messages should describe the change you made, while code comments should describe the current state of the code.
If you've just implemented a new feature, complete with doc, tests and well-commented code, a brief commit message will often suffice. If, however, you've just changed a single character deep in the parser or lexer, you might need to write a small novel to ensure that future readers understand what you did and why you did it.
Be sure to adequately comment your code. While commenting every line is unnecessary, anything that takes advantage of side effects of operators, that creates changes that will be felt outside of the function being patched, or that others may find confusing should be documented. If you are going to err, it is better to err on the side of adding too many comments than too few.
The best comments explain why the code does what it does, not what it does.
In general, please follow the particular style of the code you are patching.
In particular, follow these general guidelines for patching Perl sources:
#defines,
with 8-wide tabstops.
Use spaces for indentation, not tab characters.
The codebase is a mixture of tabs and spaces for indentation, and we are moving to spaces only. Converting lines you're patching from 8-wide tabs to spaces will help this migration.
Try hard not to exceed 79-columns ANSI C prototypes Uncuddled elses and ``K&R'' style for indenting control constructs No C++ style (//) comments Mark places that need to be revisited with XXX (and revisit often!) Opening brace lines up with ``if'' when conditional spans multiple lines; should be at end-of-line otherwise In function definitions, name starts in column 0 (return value-type is on previous line) Single space after keywords that are followed by parens, no space between function name and following paren Avoid assignments in conditionals, but if they're unavoidable, use extra paren, e.g. ``if (a && (b = c)) ...'' ``return foo;'' rather than ``return(foo);'' ``if (!foo) ...'' rather than ``if (foo == FALSE) ...'' etc. Do not declare variables using ``register''. It may be counterproductive with modern compilers, and is deprecated in C++, under which the Perl source is regularly compiled. In-line functions that are in headers that are accessible to XS code need to be able to compile without warnings with commonly used extra compilation flags, such as gcc's-Wswitch-default which warns
whenever a switch statement does not have a ``default'' case. The use of
these extra flags is to catch potential problems in legal C code, and
is often used by Perl aggregators, such as Linux distributors.
If your patch changes code (rather than just changing documentation), you should also include one or more test cases which illustrate the bug you're fixing or validate the new functionality you're adding. In general, you should update an existing test file rather than create a new one.
Your test suite additions should generally follow these guidelines (courtesy of Gurusamy Sarathy <gsar@activestate.com>):
system() unless you are testing for them. If you
do use them, make sure that you cover _all_ perl platforms.
Unlink any temporary files you create.
Promote unforeseen warnings to errors with $SIG{__WARN__}.
Be sure to use the libraries and modules shipped with the version being
tested, not those that were already installed.
Add comments to the code explaining what you are testing for.
Make updating the '1..42' string unnecessary. Or make sure that you
update it.
Test _all_ behaviors of a given operator, library, or function.
Test all optional arguments.
Test return values in various contexts (boolean, scalar, list, lvalue).
Use both global and lexical variables.
Don't forget the exceptional, pathological cases.
This works just like patching anything else, with one extra consideration.
Modules in the cpan/ directory of the source tree are maintained outside of the Perl core. When the author updates the module, the updates are simply copied into the core. See that module's documentation or its listing on http://search.cpan.org/ for more information on reporting bugs and submitting patches.
In most cases, patches to modules in cpan/ should be sent upstream
and should not be applied to the Perl core individually. If a patch to
a file in cpan/ absolutely cannot wait for the fix to be made
upstream, released to CPAN and copied to blead, you must add (or
update) a CUSTOMIZED entry in the ``Porting/Maintainers.pl'' file
to flag that a local modification has been made. See
``Porting/Maintainers.pl'' for more details.
In contrast, modules in the dist/ directory are maintained in the core.
For changes significant enough to warrant a pod/perldelta.pod entry, the porters will greatly appreciate it if you submit a delta entry along with your actual change. Significant changes include, but are not limited to:
Please make sure you add the perldelta entry to the right section
within pod/perldelta.pod. More information on how to write good
perldelta entries is available in the Style section of
Porting/how_to_write_a_perldelta.pod.
New features and extensions to the language can be contentious. There is no specific set of criteria which determine what features get added, but here are some questions to consider when developing a patch:
Our goals include, but are not limited to:
All the talk in the world is useless without an implementation. In almost every case, the person or people who argue for a new feature will be expected to be the ones who implement it. Porters capable of coding new features have their own agendas, and are not available to implement your (possibly good) idea.
It's a cardinal sin to break existing Perl programs. New warnings can be contentious--some say that a program that emits warnings is not broken, while others say it is. Adding keywords has the potential to break programs, changing the meaning of existing token sequences or functions might break programs.
The Perl 5 core includes mechanisms to help porters make backwards incompatible changes more compatible such as the the feature manpage and the deprecate manpage modules. Please use them when appropriate.
Perl 5 has extension mechanisms, modules and XS, specifically to avoid the need to keep changing the Perl interpreter. You can write modules that export functions, you can give those functions prototypes so they can be called like built-in functions, you can even write XS code to mess with the runtime data structures of the Perl interpreter if you want to implement really complicated things.
Whenever possible, new features should be prototyped in a CPAN module before they will be considered for the core.
Is this something that only the submitter wants added to the language, or is it broadly useful? Sometimes, instead of adding a feature with a tight focus, the porters might decide to wait until someone implements the more generalized feature.
Radical rewrites of large chunks of the Perl interpreter have the potential to introduce new bugs.
The smaller and more localized the change, the better. Similarly, a series of small patches is greatly preferred over a single large patch.
A patch is likely to be rejected if it closes off future avenues of development. For instance, a patch that placed a true and final interpretation on prototypes is likely to be rejected because there are still options for the future of prototypes that haven't been addressed.
Good patches (tight code, complete, correct) stand more chance of going in. Sloppy or incorrect patches might be placed on the back burner until the pumpking has time to fix, or might be discarded altogether without further notice.
The worst patches make use of system-specific features. It's highly unlikely that non-portable additions to the Perl language will be accepted.
Patches which change behaviour (fixing bugs or introducing new features) must include regression tests to verify that everything works as expected.
Without tests provided by the original author, how can anyone else changing perl in the future be sure that they haven't unwittingly broken the behaviour the patch implements? And without tests, how can the patch's author be confident that his/her hard work put into the patch won't be accidentally thrown away by someone in the future?
Patches without documentation are probably ill-thought out or incomplete. No features can be added or changed without documentation, so submitting a patch for the appropriate pod docs as well as the source code is important.
Larry said ``Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something''. This is a tricky heuristic to navigate, though--one man's essential addition is another man's pointless cruft.
Work for the pumpking, work for Perl programmers, work for module authors, ... Perl is supposed to be easy.
Working code is always preferred to pie-in-the-sky ideas. A patch to add a feature stands a much higher chance of making it to the language than does a random feature request, no matter how fervently argued the request might be. This ties into ``Will it be useful?'', as the fact that someone took the time to make the patch demonstrates a strong desire for the feature.
The core uses the same testing style as the rest of Perl, a simple ``ok/not ok'' run through Test::Harness, but there are a few special considerations.
There are three ways to write a test in the core: the Test::More manpage,
t/test.pl and ad hoc print $test ? "ok 42\n" : "not ok 42\n".
The decision of which to use depends on what part of the test suite
you're working on. This is a measure to prevent a high-level failure
(such as Config.pm breaking) from causing basic functionality tests to
fail.
The t/test.pl library provides some of the features of the Test::More manpage, but avoids loading most modules and uses as few core features as possible.
If you write your own test, use the Test Anything Protocol.
require works, or even subroutines, use ad hoc
tests for these three. Step carefully to avoid using the feature being
tested. Tests in t/opbasic, for instance, have been placed there
rather than in t/op because they test functionality which
t/test.pl presumes has already been demonstrated to work.
require() and subroutines are tested, you can use the
t/test.pl library.
You can also use certain libraries like Config conditionally, but be sure to skip the test gracefully if it's not there.
When you say ``make test'', Perl uses the t/TEST program to run the test suite (except under Win32 where it uses t/harness instead). All tests are run from the t/ directory, not the directory which contains the test. This causes some problems with the tests in lib/, so here's some opportunity for some patching.
You must be triply conscious of cross-platform concerns. This usually
boils down to using the File::Spec manpage, avoiding things like fork()
and system() unless absolutely necessary, and not assuming that a
given character has a particular ordinal value (code point) or that its
UTF-8 representation is composed of particular bytes.
There are several functions available to specify characters and code
points portably in tests. The always-preloaded functions
utf8::unicode_to_native() and its inverse
utf8::native_to_unicode() take code points and translate
appropriately. The file t/charset_tools.pl has several functions
that can be useful. It has versions of the previous two functions
that take strings as inputs -- not single numeric code points:
uni_to_native() and native_to_uni(). If you must look at the
individual bytes comprising a UTF-8 encoded string,
byte_utf8a_to_utf8n() takes as input a string of those bytes encoded
for an ASCII platform, and returns the equivalent string in the native
platform. For example, byte_utf8a_to_utf8n("\xC2\xA0") returns the
byte sequence on the current platform that form the UTF-8 for U+00A0,
since "\xC2\xA0" are the UTF-8 bytes on an ASCII platform for that
code point. This function returns "\xC2\xA0" on an ASCII platform, and
"\x80\x41" on an EBCDIC 1047 one.
But easiest is, if the character is specifiable as a literal, like
"A" or "%", to use that; if not so specificable, you can use use
\N{} , if the side effects aren't troublesome. Simply specify all
your characters in hex, using \N{U+ZZ} instead of \xZZ. \N{}
is the Unicode name, and so it
always gives you the Unicode character. \N{U+41} is the character
whose Unicode code point is 0x41, hence is 'A' on all platforms.
The side effects are:
utf8::downgrade() afterwards to convert back
to non-UTF8, if possible). In regular expression patterns, the
conversion isn't done, but if the character set modifier would
otherwise be /d, it is changed to /u.
If you use the form \N{character name}, the the charnames manpage module
gets automatically loaded. This may not be suitable for the test level
you are doing.
If you are testing locales (see the perllocale manpage), there are helper functions in t/loc_tools.pl to enable you to see what locales there are on the current platform.
make test targetsThere are various special make targets that can be used to test Perl slightly differently than the standard ``test'' target. Not all them are expected to give a 100% success rate. Many of them have several aliases, and many of them are not available on certain operating systems.
Note that under Win32 t/harness is always used instead of t/TEST, so there is no special ``test_harness'' target.
Under Win32's ``test'' target you may use the TEST_SWITCHES and TEST_FILES environment variables to control the behaviour of t/harness. This means you can say
nmake test TEST_FILES="op/*.t"
nmake test TEST_SWITCHES="-torture" TEST_FILES="op/*.t"
The core distribution can now run its regression tests in parallel on
Unix-like platforms. Instead of running make test, set TEST_JOBS
in your environment to the number of tests to run in parallel, and run
make test_harness. On a Bourne-like shell, this can be done as
TEST_JOBS=3 make test_harness # Run 3 tests in parallel
An environment variable is used, rather than parallel make itself,
because the TAP::Harness manpage needs to be able to schedule individual
non-conflicting test scripts itself, and there is no standard interface
to make utilities to interact with their job schedulers.
Note that currently some test scripts may fail when run in parallel (most notably dist/IO/t/io_dir.t). If necessary, run just the failing scripts again sequentially and see if the failures go away.
You can run part of the test suite by hand by using one of the following commands from the t/ directory:
./perl -I../lib TEST list-of-.t-files
or
./perl -I../lib harness list-of-.t-files
(If you don't specify test scripts, the whole test suite will be run.)
If you use harness for testing, you have several command line
options available to you. The arguments are as follows, and are in the
order that they must appear if used together.
harness -v -torture -re=pattern LIST OF FILES TO TEST
harness -v -torture -re LIST OF PATTERNS TO MATCH
If LIST OF FILES TO TEST is omitted, the file list is obtained from
the manifest. The file list may include shell wildcards which will be
expanded out.
You can run an individual test by a command similar to
./perl -I../lib path/to/foo.t
except that the harnesses set up some environment variables that may affect the execution of the test:
PERL_TEST_MEMORY=4 indicates that tests that require 4GiB of
available memory can be run safely.
See also the documentation for the Test and Test::Harness modules, for more environment variables that affect testing.
The file t/perf/benchmarks contains snippets of perl code which are intended to be benchmarked across a range of perls by the Porting/bench.pl tool. If you fix or enhance a performance issue, you may want to add a representative code sample to the file, then run bench.pl against the previous and current perls to see what difference it has made, and whether anything else has slowed down as a consequence.
The file t/perf/opcount.t is designed to test whether a particular
code snippet has been compiled into an optree containing specified
numbers of particular op types. This is good for testing whether
optimisations which alter ops, such as converting an aelem op into an
aelemfast op, are really doing that.
The files t/perf/speed.t and t/re/speed.t are designed to test things that run thousands of times slower if a particular optimisation is broken (for example, the utf8 length cache on long utf8 strings). Add a test that will take a fraction of a second normally, and minutes otherwise, causing the test file to time out on failure.
In the course of hacking on the Perl core distribution, you may have occasion
to configure, build and test perl at an old commit. Sometimes make will
fail during this process. If that happens, you may be able to salvage the
situation by using the Devel::PatchPerl library from CPAN (not included in the
core) to bring the source code at that commit to a buildable state.
Here's a real world example, taken from work done to resolve
perl #72414.
Use of Porting/bisect.pl had identified commit
ba77e4cc9d1ceebf472c9c5c18b2377ee47062e6 as the commit in which a bug was
corrected. To confirm, a P5P developer wanted to configure and build perl at
commit ba77e4c^ (presumably ``bad'') and then at ba77e4c (presumably
``good''). Normal configuration and build was attempted:
$ sh ./Configure -des -Dusedevel
$ make test_prep
make, however, failed with output (excerpted) like this:
cc -fstack-protector -L/usr/local/lib -o miniperl \
gv.o toke.o perly.o pad.o regcomp.o dump.o util.o \
mg.o reentr.o mro.o hv.o av.o run.o pp_hot.o sv.o \
pp.o scope.o pp_ctl.o pp_sys.o doop.o doio.o regexec.o \
utf8.o taint.o deb.o universal.o globals.o perlio.o \
perlapi.o numeric.o mathoms.o locale.o pp_pack.o pp_sort.o \
miniperlmain.o opmini.o perlmini.o
pp.o: In function `Perl_pp_pow':
pp.c:(.text+0x2db9): undefined reference to `pow'
...
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
makefile:348: recipe for target 'miniperl' failed
make: *** [miniperl] Error 1
Another P5P contributor recommended installation and use of Devel::PatchPerl for this situation, first to determine the version of perl at the commit in question, then to patch the source code at that point to facilitate a build.
$ perl -MDevel::PatchPerl -e \
'print Devel::PatchPerl->determine_version("/path/to/sourcecode"), "\n";'
5.11.1
$ perl -MDevel::PatchPerl -e \
'Devel::PatchPerl->patch_source("5.11.1", "/path/to/sourcecode");'
Once the source was patched, ./Configure and make test_prep were called
and completed successfully, enabling confirmation of the findings in RT
#72414.
To hack on the Perl guts, you'll need to read the following things:
If you plan on doing serious C hacking, make sure to read this.
Gisle Aas's ``illustrated perlguts'', also known as illguts, has very helpful pictures:
http://search.cpan.org/dist/illguts/
The CPAN testers ( http://testers.cpan.org/ ) are a group of volunteers who test CPAN modules on a variety of platforms.
Perl Smokers ( http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.daily-build/ and http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.daily-build.reports/ ) automatically test Perl source releases on platforms with various configurations.
Both efforts welcome volunteers. In order to get involved in smoke testing of the perl itself visit http://search.cpan.org/dist/Test-Smoke/. In order to start smoke testing CPAN modules visit http://search.cpan.org/dist/CPANPLUS-YACSmoke/ or http://search.cpan.org/dist/minismokebox/ or http://search.cpan.org/dist/CPAN-Reporter/.
If you've read all the documentation in the document and the ones listed above, you're more than ready to hack on Perl.
Here's some more recommendations
If you can do these things, you've started on the long road to Perl porting. Thanks for wanting to help make Perl better - and happy hacking!
If you recognized the quote about the Road above, you're in luck.
Most software projects begin each file with a literal description of each file's purpose. Perl instead begins each with a literary allusion to that file's purpose.
Like chapters in many books, all top-level Perl source files (along with a few others here and there) begin with an epigrammatic inscription that alludes, indirectly and metaphorically, to the material you're about to read.
Quotations are taken from writings of J.R.R. Tolkien pertaining to his Legendarium, almost always from The Lord of the Rings. Chapters and page numbers are given using the following editions:
Other JRRT books fair game for quotes would thus include The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The Tale of the Children of Hurin, all but the first posthumously assembled by CJRT. But The Lord of the Rings itself is perfectly fine and probably best to quote from, provided you can find a suitable quote there.
So if you were to supply a new, complete, top-level source file to add to Perl, you should conform to this peculiar practice by yourself selecting an appropriate quotation from Tolkien, retaining the original spelling and punctuation and using the same format the rest of the quotes are in. Indirect and oblique is just fine; remember, it's a metaphor, so being meta is, after all, what it's for.
This document was originally written by Nathan Torkington, and is maintained by the perl5-porters mailing list.
| perlhack - How to hack on Perl |