Re: [GSoC] Proposal accepted

[Matthias Paulmier]

Mathieu Lirzin <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello Matthias,
>
> Matthias Paulmier <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I am very glad to announce that my proposal has been accepted ! I will
>> be working this summer on modularizing Automake and improving its test
>> suite.
>
> Congrats.
>
>> The community bonding period starts today until May the 14th. I will be
>> a bit busy this week with my final exams (I failed to mention it in my
>> proposals since I didn't realize those two things would overlap). My
>> exams end on Friday.
>
> No problem.
>
>> As explained in my proposal, I will dedicate this period to familiarize
>> myself with the Perl programming language as well as Automake's code. If
>> anyone has any tips on how to setup my environment for it I will gladly
>> take them :) (I'm using Debian GNU/Linux testing and Emacs as my
>> editor). I am also looking for good resources on Perl.
>
> It depends on your preference but basically Emacs has 2 major modes for Perl:
>
>   - perl-mode
>   - cperl-mode
>
> ‘perl-mode’ is the default but you can use ‘cperl-mode’ by adding the
> following to your “.emacs”:
>
>    (defalias 'perl-mode 'cperl-mode)

Nice, I guess I will decide which one I prefer when I use it.

Just after sending this I realized that there is a .dir-locals.el file
that sets up these modes to follow the project's styling conventions
which is convenient.

> I found it nice to have an interactive interpreter when programming with
> perl.  In emacs you can run ‘M-x perldb <RET> perl -d -e ''’ for that.
>
> One important point and not solved yet will be to use tags to navigate
> to the definition of a particular subroutine easily.  I will take a look
> if the ‘make tags’ result can be fixed.  For now you can use ‘M-x
> rgrep‘.
>
> In term of documentation Perl comes with an extensive set of manpages
> which consist of tutorials and reference manuals.  In Emacs they can
> conveniently be accessed with ‘M-x man <RET> perl’.  ‘perlintro(1)’ is a
> good entry point.  You can take a look at the “Learning Perl” book by
> Tom Phoenix and Randal Schwartz too.

I got myself a copy of "Learning Perl" from the university's library. I
will also have a look at the resources suggested in Vishal's thread.

The tutorials and man pages from the perl documentations will be very
helpful too.

> In order to discover Automake, the best you can do at the beginning is
> to compile it (from Git) and report unclear points.  It will be
> important to broadly understand Automake from a user perspective before
> the coding period, so you can alternate your perl discovery with some
> experimentation with Automake by following Automake info manual.

Will definitely do that.

> If you have any questions or difficulty in your discovery, you can ask
> on the #autotools IRC channel on Freenode or directly to me (my pseudo
> is ‘mthl’).

Cool, I looked for #automake on Freenode but didn't think about
#autotools... I will check in (probably through matrix in the first
place because I may often loose connection) as 'mattplm'.

Thanks
--
Matthias Paulmier