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Contributing

Your patches to perl6/doc are very welcome.

This document describes how to get started and helps to provide documentation that adheres to the common style and formatting guidelines.

If you have any questions regarding contributing to this project, please ask in the #perl6 IRC channel.

General principles

  • Please use the present tense.
  • Link to external resources (like Wikipedia) for topics that are not directly related to Perl 6 (like the math that our routines implement)
  • Duplicate small pieces of information rather than rely on linking
  • Be explicit about routine signatures. If a method accepts a *%args, but treats some of them specially, list them separately.

Documenting types

The POD documentation of types is located in the lib/Type directory and subdirectories of this repository. For example the POD of X::Bind::Slice lives in lib/Type/X/Bind/Slice.pod.

To start contributing fork and checkout the repository, find the document you want to improve, commit your changes, and create a pull request. Should questions come up in the process feel free to ask in #perl6 IRC channel.

If the documentation for a type does not exist create the skeleton of the doc with the helper tool util/new-type.p6. Say you want to create MyFunnyRole:

$ perl6 util/new-type.p6 MyFunnyRole

Fill the documentation file lib/Type/MyFunnyRole.pod like this:

=TITLE role MyFunnyRole

=SUBTITLE Sentence or half-sentence about what it does

    role MyFunnyRole does OtherRole is SuperClass { ... }

Longer description here about what this type is, and
how you can use it.

    # usage example goes here

=head1 Methods

=head2 method do-it

    method do-it(Int $how-often) returns Nil:D

Method description here

    MyFunnyRole.do-it(2);   # example output

When documenting a pair of a sub and a method which both do the same thing, the heading should be =head2 routine do-it, and the next thing should be two or more lines with the signatures. Other allowed words instead of method are sub, trait, infix, prefix, postfix, circumfix, postcircumfix, term.

Building the documentation

Assuming that you have already forked and cloned the perl6/doc repository, one of the first things you probably want to do is to build the documentation on your local computer. To do this you will need:

  • Rakudo (the Rakudo Perl 6 implementation)
  • Panda (the installer for third party Perl 6 modules)
  • Pod::To::HTML (Perl 6 module for converting Pod objects to HTML)
  • Mojolicious (a web framework; it runs the web app to display the docs)
  • pygmentize (optional; a program to add syntax highlighting to code examples)
  • Inline::Python (optional; run Python code from within Perl 6, necessary for faster execution of pygmentize)

Dependency installation

Rakudo

Install Rakudo via rakudobrew.

Clone the rakudobrew repository

$ git clone https://github.com/tadzik/rakudobrew ~/.rakudobrew

and add rakudobrew to your PATH (also add this line to e.g. ~/.profile):

$ export PATH=~/.rakudobrew/bin:$PATH

To build the Rakudo Perl 6 implementation with the MoarVM backend, simply run

$ rakudobrew build moar

If everything is set up correctly, the executable perl6 should be in your PATH. As a simple test, run perl6 and see if the REPL prompt appears:

$ perl6
>

Exit the REPL by pressing Ctrl-d or typing exit at the prompt.

Panda

After rakudobrew is installed, installing panda is very easy:

$ rakudobrew build-panda

Now the panda command should be available.

Pod::To::HTML

The program which builds the HTML version of the documentation (htmlify.p6) uses Pod::To::HTML to convert Pod structures into HTML. Install Pod::To::HTML like so:

$ panda install Pod::To::HTML

Mojolicious

This is a Perl 5 web framework which is used to run the web application which renders and displays the HTML documentation in a web browser. It is written in Perl 5, so assuming that you use cpanm, install this now:

$ cpanm Mojolicious

pygmentize

This program adds syntax highlighting to the code examples. Highlighting of Perl 6 code was added in version 2.0, so you need at least this version if you wish to produced syntax highlighted documentation on your local computer.

If you use Debian/Jessie, you can install pygmentize via the python-pygments package:

$ aptitude install python-pygments

On Ubuntu install the package python-pygments:

$ sudo apt-get install python-pygments

On Fedora the package is also named python-pygments:

$ sudo yum install python-pygments

Otherwise, you probably need to use pip (the Python package installer):

$ pip install pygmentize

Inline::Python

Inline::Python is optional, however will speed up documentation builds using syntax highlighting. It can simply be installed via panda

$ panda install Inline::Python

Build and view the documentation

To actually build the documentation all you now need to do is run htmlify.p6:

$ perl6 htmlify.p6

This takes a while, but be patient!

After the build has completed, you can start the web application which will render the HTML documentation

$ perl app.pl daemon   # note!  Perl 5 *not* Perl 6 here

Now point your web browser to http://localhost:3000 to view the documentation.