Re: [MirageOS-devel] Questions about contributing

[Mindy <mindy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Federico!

Responses are inline below.

On 10/22/2016 12:23 PM, Federico Gimenez wrote:

Hello all!

I'm looking for a way to start contributing to Mirage, I currently work as a Software Quality Engineer and have an extensive developer background, this is my github profile [1]. I've just begun learning OCaml and I'm really enjoying it so far.

This is really great to hear! :D

From the list at [2] I'd be interested in looking at "tiny VM for easy load testing", please let me know if it's still needing help, if it's appropriate for a newbie and how to begin if so. Also "topkg porting" and "logging" seem appealing to me.

There's still a ton of work to be done converting libraries (1) to topkg and away from OASIS and (2) to use the Logs library instead of Console.log or printf.

I did a bit of digging[1] in the package universe, and here's a small list of libraries that are still have an `_oasis` present in their root directory.  The `opam` package name is listed first, then the repository where it lives:

cstruct (https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-cstruct)
crunch (https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-crunch)
ipaddr (https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-ipaddr)
qcow-format (https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-qcow)
mirage-console-xen (https://github.com/mirage/mirage-console) (this repository has code for both the mirage-console-xen and mirage-console-unix packages)

Converting things to topkg from oasis generally involves removing a bunch of autogenerated code and adding a small amount of structure around the invocation of topkg.  topkg has documentation at http://erratique.ch/software/topkg , including a "menagerie" of examples at http://erratique.ch/software/topkg/doc/Topkg.html#menagerie .  It's helpful to know a small amount about ocamlbuild (the build system that _oasis was autogenerating code to manage, and which topkg provides a simpler interface to) -- some documentation is available at https://nicolaspouillard.fr/ocamlbuild/ocamlbuild-user-guide.html .

Logging's just seen a lot of activity over the past weekend!  Probably verbosemode and hannesm can speak more to what might be valuable to look at immediately.

Similarly, I think djs55 can speak better to what might make sense to look at alongside the "tiny vm for load testing" project.

Thanks a lot for reaching out to the list!  We're happy to hear from you. :)

-Mindy

[1] given a local copy of `opam-repository`, find packages which have at least one release with `org:mirage` mentioned somewhere in their `opam` file; for each such package, `opam source --dev-repo` to download the current trunk version and look for an `_oasis` there; use human brain to choose active projects which don't currently have someone topkging them

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