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Contributing

Your patches to perl6/doc are very welcome, and if you want to help, please read this guide as well as the detailed instructions below.

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

Your contributions here will be credited in the next Rakudo release announcement. Your name from the commit log will be used. If you'd like to be credited under a different name, please add it to the local CREDITS file (or ask someone to do it for you until you have commit privileges).

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 an *%args, but treats some of them specially, list them separately.
  • Check out the styleguide for further guidance.
  • If you are participating in one of the monthly squashathons, please read this guide.

Documenting versions

  • If you are adding a recently introduced feature, please indicate in a note which version it was introduced in.
  • If you change an example to use the new feature, leave the old example if it's still working, at least while it's not obsolete, for people who have not upgraded yet, clarifying in the text around it the versions it will run with.

Writing Code Examples

See EXAMPLES.md for detailed information on the options available when writing code examples in the documentation.

Adding a new Language document

We suggest you discuss proposing a new Language document on the #perl6 channel and/or the issues for this repository before you proceed further. After you get consensus on a title, subtitle, section, and filename, you can add the document by following these steps:

  • create a filename.pod6 file in the doc/Language directory and ensure it adheres to the conventions in CREATING-NEW-DOCS.md.

  • create an entry for your new document in the Language directory's 00-POD6-CONTROL file following the instructions there.

Documenting types

The Pod 6 documentation of types is located in the doc/Type directory and subdirectories of this repository. For example the Pod 6 file 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 --kind=role 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 --> Nil:D)

Method description here

    MyFunnyRole.do-it(2);   # OUTPUT: «example output␤»

When documenting a pair of a sub and a method with the same functionality, 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<>.

When providing a code example result or output, use this style:

# For the result of an expression.
1 + 2;     # RESULT: «3»
# For the output.
say 1 + 3; # OUTPUT: «3␤»
# For the explanatory comment
do-work;   # We call do-work sub

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.

If you have local modifications and want to insure they pass xtest before committing, you can use this command to test only modified files:

TEST_FILES=`git status --porcelain --untracked-files=no | awk '{print $2}'` make xtest

Writing and Testing Examples

See Writing and Testing Examples

Testing method completeness

To get a list of methods that are found via introspection but not found in any Pod 6 file 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 Pod 6-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.

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 well structured. You can use debug mode to display heading numbers.

Reporting bugs

Report issues at https://github.com/perl6/doc/issues. You can use labels when tagging tickets, among which these are probably the most common:

  • docs - missing or incorrect documentation; use NOTSPECCED instead, if this is for a feature present in a compiler, but not in the Perl 6 test suite.
  • search - the search component, either for items that are on the site but not searchable, or for the search functionality itself.

If you would like to contribute documentation or other bug fixes, please use GitHub's pull requests.

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:

  • Perl 6 (e.g., the Rakudo Perl 6 implementation)
  • zef (the installer for third party Perl 6 modules)
  • Pod::To::HTML (Perl 6 module for converting Pod 6 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)
  • SASS Compiler
  • highlights (optional; requires nodejs, npm, and at least GCC-4.8 on Linux to be installed. Running make will set everything up for you.)
    • Debian instructions:
      • Get more modern nodejs than in package manager: curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -
      • Run make init-highlights to initialize highlights
      • If that still isn't working try running npm install node-gyp -g and try running make command again

Dependency installation

Rakudo

You need Perl 6 installed. You can install the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler by downloading the latest Rakudo Star release from rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

For best results, you will need to install one of the latest versions, > 2018.11 if possible. It's not guaranteed to work with other versions, and in any case the produced documentation will not look the same.

Zef

Zef is a Perl 6 module installer. If you installed Rakudo Star package, it should already be there. Feel free to use any other module installer for the modules needed (see below).

Pod::To::HTML

The program that builds the HTML version of the documentation (htmlify.p6) uses Pod::To::HTML to convert Pod 6 structures into HTML. You'll also need Pod::To::BigPage. Install these modules like so:

$ zef 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

SASS Compiler

To build the styles, you need to have a SASS compiler. You can either install the sass command

$ sudo apt-get install ruby-sass

or the CSS::Sass Perl 5 module

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

The SASS files are compiled when you run make html, or make sass, or start the development webserver (./app-start).

Build and view the documentation

The Makefile has a lot of targets to help with building and testing the doc website and its presented documentation. Use this command to see them:

$ make help

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

$ make html

This takes a while, but be patient!

After the build has completed, you can start the web application which will render the HTML documentation on a web server on your build host:

$ make run

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

Using Docker to build and view the documentation

You can skip all the above and just build and view documentation with these simple commands (if you have docker already installed):

$ docker build -t perl6-doc .
$ docker run -p 3000:3000 -it -v `pwd`:/perl6/doc perl6-doc

This will build the documentation for you by default and it will take some time, but for subsequent use you may want to skip build part if nothing has been changed:

$ docker run -p 3000:3000 -it -v `pwd`:/perl6/doc perl6-doc ./app-start

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

Alternatively, you can use make to build and run your container. To build the image:

$ make docker-image

To build the HTML documentation:

$ make docker-htmlify

To run the development web server for viewing documentation (on port 3000):

$ make docker-run

Note that while this requires less typing, some assumptions will be made for you regarding the name of the resulting image, the port the content is available over, etc. If you want, you can override these default values.

For instance, if you want the local documentation to be available over port 5001 of the host, pass the following to make when running:

$ make docker-run DOCKER_HOST_PORT=5001

Now the documentation will be available on the host at http://localhost:5001. Please see the Makefile for a list of available options.