Dancer::Development(3)User Contributed Perl DocumentatioDancer::Development(3)NAMEDancer::Development - guide for developers interested in contributing
DESCRIPTION
This guide has been written to help anyone interested in contributing
to the development of Dancer.
First of all - thank you for your interest in the project! It's the
community of helpful contributors who've helped Dancer experience
phenomenal growth to get to where it is today.
Please read this guide before contributing to Dancer, to avoid wasted
effort and maximizing the chances of your contributions being used.
WAYS TO CONTRIBUTE
There are many ways to contribute to the project. Dancer is a young yet
active project and any kind of help is very much appreciated!
Publicity
You don't have to start by hacking the code, spreading the word is very
valuable as well!
If you have a blog, just feel free to speak about Dancer.
If you're a Twitter user, you can tweet about it with the hashtag
"#perl" (and feel free to follow @PerlDancer for news and updates on
Dancer!).
Of course, it doesn't have to be limited to blogs or Twitter. Feel
free to spread the word in whatever way you consider fit and drop us a
line on the Dancer user mailing list noted below.
Also, if you're using and enjoying Dancer,
http://cpanratings.perl.org/dist/Dancer, explaining what you like about
Dancer is another very valuable contribution that helps other new users
find us!
Mailing list / IRC community
Subscribing to the mailing list and/or hanging out on our IRC channel
and providing assistance to new users is incredibly valuable.
· Mailing list:
http://lists.perldancer.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/dancer-users
<http://lists.perldancer.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/dancer-users> to
subscribe or view archives
· IRC: "#dancer" on "irc.perl.org", or
<http://www.perldancer.org/irc> for a quick web client.
Documentation
While we value documentation very much, it's difficult to keep it up-
to-date. If you find a typo or an error in the documentation please do
let us know - ideally by submitting a patch with your fix (see "Patch
Submission").
Contribute to CPAN Testers
If you have access to perl on rare operating systems, please consider
contributing tests. See
<http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/TestDuringInstall> for more
information.
Code
You can write extensions (plugins) for Dancer extending Dancer's core
functionality or contribute to Dancer's core code, see "Patch
Submission" below.
GENERAL DEVELOPMENT GUIDELINES
This section lists high-level recommendations for developing Dancer,
for more detailed guidelines, see "Coding Guidelines" below.
Quality Assurance
Dancer should be able to install for all Perl versions since 5.8, on
any platform for which Perl exists. We focus mainly on GNU/Linux (any
distribution), *BSD and Windows (native and Cygwin).
We should avoid regressions as much as possible and keep backwards
compatibility in mind when refactoring. Stable releases should not
break functionality and new releases should provide an upgrade path and
upgrade tips such as warning the user about deprecated functionality.
Quality Supervision
We can measure our quality using the CPAN testers platform:
<http://www.cpantesters.org>.
A good way to help the project is to find a failing build log on the
CPAN testers: <http://www.cpantesters.org/distro/D/Dancer.html>
If you find a failing test report, feel free to report it as a GitHub
issue: <http://github.com/sukria/Dancer/issues>.
Reporting Bugs
We prefer to have all our bug reports on GitHub, in the issues section:
<http://github.com/sukria/Dancer/issues>. It's possible though to
report bugs on RT as well:
<https://rt.cpan.org/Dist/Display.html?Queue=Dancer>
Please make sure the bug you're reporting does not yet exist. In doubt
please ask on IRC.
Patch Submission
The Dancer development team uses GitHub to collaborate. We greatly
appreciate contributions submitted via GitHub, as it makes tracking
these contributions and applying them much, much easier. This gives
your contribution a much better chance of being integrated into Dancer
quickly!
To help us achieve high-quality, stable releases, git-flow workflow is
used to handle pull-requests, that means contributors must work on
their "devel" branch rather than on their "master". (Master should be
touched only by the core dev team when preparing a release to CPAN; all
ongoing development happens in branches which are merged to the "devel"
branch.)
Here is the workflow for submitting a patch:
· Fork the repository <http://github.com/sukria/Dancer> (click
"Fork")
· Clone your fork to have a local copy using the following command:
$ git clone git://github.com/myname/Dancer.git
· As a contributor, you should always work on the "devel" branch of
your clone ("master" is used only for building releases).
$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/sukria/Dancer.git
$ git fetch upstream
$ git checkout -b devel upstream/devel
This will create a local branch in your clone named "devel" and
that will track the official "devel" branch. That way, if you have
more or less commits than the upstream repo, you'll be immediately
notified by git.
· You want to isolate all your commits in a topic branch, this will
make the reviewing much easier for the core team and will allow you
to continue working on your clone without worrying about different
commits mixing together.
To do that, first create a local branch to build your pull request:
# you should be in devel here
git checkout -b pr/$name
Now you have created a local branch named pr/$name where $name is
the name you want (it should describe the purpose of the pull
request you're preparing).
In that branch, do all the commits you need (the more the better)
and when done, push the branch to your fork:
# ... commits ...
git push origin pr/$name
You are now ready to send a pull request.
· Send a pull request via the GitHub interface. Make sure your pull
request is based on the pr/$name branch you've just pushed, so that
it incorporates the appropriate commits only.
It's also a good idea to summarize your work in a report sent to
the users mailing list (see below), in order to make sure the team
is aware of it.
You could also notify the core team on IRC, on "irc.perl.org",
channel "#dancer" or <http://www.perldancer.org/irc>.
· When the core team reviews your pull request, it will either accept
(and then merge into devel) or refuse your request.
If it's refused, try to understand the reasons explained by the
team for the denial. Most of the time, communicating with the core
team is enough to understand what the mistake was. Above all,
please don't be offended.
If your pull-request is merged into devel, then all you have to do
is to remove your local and remote pr/$name branch:
git checkout devel
git branch -D pr/$name
git push origin :pr/$name
And then, of course, you need to sync your local devel branch with
the upstream:
git pull upstream devel
git push origin devel
You're now ready to start working on a new pull request!
About the Release Cycle
Since version 1.2, the team has decided to take a step further toward
production concerns: Dancer now promises to provide an API-stable and
feature frozen release, whose updates will only be about bugfixes and
documentation updates.
After some discussion with the core-team members, it has been agreed
that the 1.2xx release series will be the first of this kind, and will
live as long as 1.3xx lives.
As soon as the last 1.3xx release is mature enough and the core team is
happy with, it will be uploaded as the first version of the 1.4xx
series, and 1.2xx will become obsolete.
This lets us evolve quickly in our main track (devel in GitHub will
contain all the daily work we want to make 1.3xx better) but as well,
it lets us assure maintainability for the 1.2 series, as we will
probably have to fix a bug somewhere in 1.2 without merging with new
stuff contained in the devel branch.
That's why a maintenance branch is added to the repo. To be very clear,
this branch is named "frozen", to reflect the idea that the source-code
in this branch is not meant to evolve regarding features. It should
only contains fixes for bug or documentation updates.
If you want to submit a pull-request to the frozen branch (that means
1.3xx is out and you've found a bug in 1.2xx) you need to base your
work on the "frozen" branch. Use the same procedure explained before,
but with the "frozen" branch.
RESOURCES FOR DEVELOPERS
Mailing Lists
A mailing list is available here:
http://lists.perldancer.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/dancer-users
<http://lists.perldancer.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/dancer-users>
IRC Channels
You can reach the development team on irc.perl.org, channel #dancer or
via a web chat interface at <http://www.perldancer.org/irc>. We're
always happy to hear from users and contributors.
Repositories
The official repository is hosted on GitHub at the following location:
<http://github.com/sukria/Dancer>.
Official developers have write access to this repository, contributors
are invited to fork it if they want to submit patches, as explained in
the Patch submission section.
The repository layout is organized as follows:
· "master"
This branch is dedicated to prepare CPAN releases. We push to that
branch only for packaging a new release. Every CPAN version are
made from this branch.
· "devel"
This is the development branch. New features are pushed here, and
will be merged to master when the next release is being prepared.
CODING GUIDELINES
This section describes standards and requirements for coding. For more
broad guidelines, see "GENERAL DEVELOPMENT GUIDELINES" above.
About Dependencies
Dancer is intended to be a micro-framework. That means among other
things that it should remain lightweight. For this reason we try very
hard to keep the dependencies as low as possible. On the other hand, we
don't want to reinvent the wheel either.
We not likely to accept a new dependency to the core unless there is a
very good reason.
If a patch provides a new feature that depends on a module, the
solution is to perform a dynamic loading. Dancer has a class dedicated
to that job: Dancer::ModuleLoader. Here is an example of how to use it:
package Dancer::Some::Thing;
use Carp;
sub init {
Dancer::ModuleLoader->load('Some::Deps')
or croak "the feature provided by Dancer::Some::Thing needs Some::Deps";
}
That way, an optional feature doesn't block Dancer from being installed
since the dependency check is performed at runtime.
Perltidy
Tests
RELEASING
Public Releases
Public and stable releases are those without an underline ('_') in the
version number. The latest stable release can be downloaded from CPAN
and github.com.
Developer Releases
Developer releases are those which include an underline ('_') in the
version number. Whenever the devel branch has been merged into the
master branch, the CPAN release built must be a developer version (the
version number contains a '_').
Before a new release is made, the uploaders must wait for the CPAN
testers reports. This is done to make sure the new merge doesn't bring
regressions.
Roadmap
For current information on Dancer's plans for the future, see the file
TODO at <https://github.com/sukria/Dancer/blob/master/TODO>.
AUTHOR
This document has been written by Alexis Sukrieh sukria@cpan.org
perl v5.14.1 2011-07-26 Dancer::Development(3)