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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.

Your contributions will be credited in Rakudo release announcement. You name from the commit log will be used. If you'd like to be credited under a different name, please add it to CREDITS file

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS

General principles

  • Please use the present tense, and active voice.
  • 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.
  • Check out the styleguide for further guidance
  • For website: we support the current and previous major releases of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer (Edge), and Safari. Please test layout changes. Lacking actual browsers to test in, you can use browsershots.org or browserstack.com. Ensure the layout looks OK on mobile.

Documenting types

The POD documentation of types is located in the doc/Type directory and subdirectories of this repository. For example the POD of X::Bind::Slice lives in doc/Type/X/Bind/Slice.pod6.

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 doc/Type/MyFunnyRole.pod6 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. If you wish to hide a heading from any index prefix it with the empty comment Z<>.

Running tests

Any contributions should pass the make test target. This insures basic integrity of the documentation, and is run automatically by a corresponding travis build. Even edits made via the github editor should pass this test.

The repo should also pass make xtest most of the time - this includes tests about whitespace and spelling that might be difficult to get right on an initial commit, and shouldn't be considered to break the build. If you're contributing a patch or pull request, please make sure this passes.

Testing examples

To export examples from all .pod6-files use make extract-examples. To run individual tests pick the right .p6-file from examples/ as a parameter to perl6.

Skipping tests

Some examples fail with compile time exceptions and would interrupt the test for a file. Use the pod-config option skip-test to skip them.

=begin code :skip-test
    your-example-here();
=end code

Catching expected exception

Some tests will throw exceptions that would stop the execution of the extracted test file. Use the pod-option catch-all to have a default handler installed for a single example.

=begin code :catch-all
    exception-generator-here();
=end code

Testing method completeness

To get a list of methods that are found via introspection but not found in any pod6 under doc/Type/, use util/list-missing-methods.p6. It takes a directory or filepath as argument and limits the listing to the given file or any pod6-files found. All methods listed in util/ignored-methods.txt are ignored.

Debug mode

On the right side of the footer you can find [Debug: off]. Click it and reload the page to activate debug mode. The state of debug mode will be remembered by window.sessionStorage and will not survive a browser restart or opening the docs in a new tab.

Invisible index anchors

You can create index entries and invisible anchors with X<|thing,category>. To make them visible activate debug mode.

Viewport size

If you change the layout please check different screen sizes. Debug mode will display the viewport size in the bottom left corner.

Broken links

To check for broken links use debug mode. Any spotted broken link will be listed under the search input. Please note that some external links may not get checked depending on your browser settings.

Heading numbering

Please check if the headings you add are of sound structure. You can use debug mode to display heading numbers.

Reporting bugs

Report issues at https://github.com/perl6/doc/issues. You can use the following labels when tagging tickets:

  • site - presentation issue with the website (e.g. invalid HTML)

  • docs - missing or incorrect documentation

  • build - scripts or libraries that generate the site

  • search - the search component

  • LHF - for a beginner to work on

  • big - a big issue, may require some research

Website Styles

The html/css/style.css file is built from assets/sass/style.sass. Please don't edit html/css/style.css directly, as your changes will be lost the next time the SASS file is processed.

SASS is a superset of CSS, so if you don't know SASS, just write in regular CSS. Run app.pl to automatically process SASS and copy the result over to html/css/style.css

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)
  • graphviz (sudo apt-get install graphviz on Debian/Ubuntu)
  • Mojolicious (optional; a Perl 5 web framework; it allows you to run a web app locally 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 that builds the HTML version of the documentation (htmlify.p6) uses Pod::To::HTML to convert Pod structures into HTML. You'll also need Pod::To::BigPage. Install these modules like so:

$ panda install Pod::To::HTML Pod::To::BigPage

Mojolicious / Web Server

This is a Perl 5 web framework which is used to run the included web application that displays the HTML documentation in a web browser. It's no required for development, as the site is static and you can serve it using any other webserver.

The app does automatically convert the SASS file to CSS, so it's handy to use for that as well.

Mojolicious is written in Perl 5, so assuming that you use cpanm, install this now:

$ cpanm -vn Mojolicious

If you also plan on modifying the SASS stylesheets, install these modules to enable SASS processor:

$ cpanm -vn CSS::Sass Mojolicious::Plugin::AssetPack

Alternatively, you can install sass program and process SASS using that instead:

$ sass -w assets/sass/style.scss:html/css/style.css

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.

First, you'll need the Python Devel header files and libraries if they have not already been installed:

On Debian, install the python-dev package:

aptitude install python-dev

On Ubuntu, the package is also named python-dev:

sudo apt-get install python-dev

On Fedora, install the python-devel package:

sudo yum install python-devel

Use panda to install the Inline::Python module:

$ 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.