Contributing to Rubinius
The Rubinius project welcomes your contributions. There are many things to do to help out. Most importantly, you should do something that interests you. That is the best way to have enthusiasm and energy for your work.
If you have questions about Rubinius, the best way to get answers is to chat with us in the #rubinius IRC channel on irc.freenode.net.
Below are several ideas for things to do on Rubinius.
Run Your Code
Your code is often more vicious than the specs. Run your pet project under rubinius and report issues. See how to write a ticket.
Ask For Help
Anything that we can do to help, we will. Make sure to do your own research too, if possible. Rubinius attempts to be a project that you can easily study, learn from, and hopefully extend.
We will certainly accept and appreciate simple bug reports, but we can give priority to tickets that include simple steps to reproduce the issue. Even better are tickets that include RubySpecs that demonstrate the bug and a patch that fixes it.
Write Specs
-
Run ‘bin/mspec tag –list incomplete
’ to show specs that have been tagged as incomplete. These specs may simply need review, or there could be specs missing for a particular class. NOTE: You can specify the pseudo-directory ‘:files’ for
, which will show tags for all the specs that should run on Rubinius. Or you can specify any subdirectory of the spec/ directory to list tags for specs in that subdirectory. -
Find unspecified behaviors. See how to write a Ruby spec.
Fix Failing Specs
-
Run ‘bin/mspec tag –list fails
’ to show specs tagged as failing. NOTE: You can specify the pseudo-directory ‘:files’ for
, which will show tags for all the specs that should run on Rubinius. Or you can specify any subdirectory of the spec/ directory to list tags for specs in that subdirectory. -
Pick a spec that looks interesting and see if you can write a patch that will make it pass.
Write Docs
Study how Rubinius works and write highlevel documentation that will help others learn about the implementation details. See documents under doc/vm for examples.
Cleanup Code
Search for tags like TODO, HACK, FIXME in the code and submit patches to fix them. Here’s a command to search the code:
'grep -re "@todo\|TODO\|HACK\|FIXME" .'
Review the style guide for coding guidelines.
Triage Tickets
- Revive or close old tickets.
- Build minimal test cases that reproduce the bugs. Then see if there are already RubySpecs for the issue. If not, consider writing some.