Re: Proposal Accepted for GSoC

[Al Pacifico]

Matthias and Vishal-

On Wed, Apr 25, 2018 at 11:43 AM, Mathieu Lirzin <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hello Vishal,
>
> Vishal Gupta <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > My proposal for the project " Parse Makefile.am using abstract syntax
> > tree" has been accepted and I am excited to start working on the same.
>
> Congrats!
>
> > The community bonding period will be till 14th May. As discussed in
> > the proposal, I will be working on improving my perl skills and
> > understanding the Automake's Code. Some queries about that :
> >
> > 1) Good resource for studying Perl and important concepts required for
> > completing the project. A short task of 4-5 days would be great for
> > testing my knowledge of perl and quantify my progress.
>
> Like I said to Matthias, Perl comes with an extensive set of manpages
> which consist of tutorials and reference manuals.  ‘perlintro(1)’ is a
> good entry point.  The “Learning Perl” book by Tom Phoenix and Randal
> Schwartz is a nice introduction to Perl.
>
> You will need to get familiar with perl references which is a somewhat
> advance topic in order to build recursive structure for the AST.
>
> To learn Perl I think it is important to have an interactive environment
> ‘perl -d -e ''’ is useful for that.
>

I'd like to add to what Mathieu wrote regarding becoming familiar with Perl.

I have used Perl off and on extensively over the past 20-odd years and
there are eight Perl books on my bookshelf.  I'm guessing that you will be
using its object-oriented features for this project, and looking over my
second edition of "Learning Perl," it has no coverage of OO features,
although they are mentioned on pages 195-197.

My recollection is that I learned most about Perl's OO features from Damian
Conway's "Object Oriented Perl"
<https://www.amazon.com/Object-Oriented-Perl-Comprehensive-Programming/dp/1884777791>
which
is available as a used book very cheaply.  Probably the chapter on OO
features in the hefty O'Reilly title "Programming Perl"
<https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Perl-Unmatched-processing-scripting/dp/0596004923>
(AKA "the Camel book") would do just as well.  If I were to own one Perl
book, it would be the Camel, but it is pricey.

-Al

>
> > 2) How to go about understanding the Automake code .
>
> The first step is to compile it from the Git repository and report
> unclear points.  I encourage you to get familiar with Automake from a
> user perspective by creating build definitions for some dummy C programs
> and libraries by following the Automake manual which is nicely written.
>
> > 3) Any other task required to be completed during the community bonding
> period.
>
> I think, it is important that you get more familiar with Git usage and
> good practices before the coding period.  There is a lot of resources
> online and particularly a great book freely available:
>
>   https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2
>
> > As discussed in the proposal that I will be having my exams from 8th
> > to 15th May, so I will try to complete the work before that time.
>
> No problem.
>
> If you have any question or difficulty in your discovery, you can ask on
> the #autotools IRC channel on Freenode or directly to me (my pseudo is
> ‘mthl’).  I am not sure about your actual timezone (mine is UTC+2) but
> if you are from India don't expect me to available too soon in the
> morning.  :-)
>
> HTH,
>
> --
> Mathieu Lirzin
> GPG: F2A3 8D7E EB2B 6640 5761  070D 0ADE E100 9460 4D37
>
>


-- 
Please forgive typo's, equally likely to have been typed on cell phone and
to have been typed one-handed.