This is a page aimed at helping students working on Parrot as part of Google Summer of Code to get acclimated into the community. It doesn't deal with any coding matters but rather the administrative matters you'll need to get out of the way first.

The first thing you'll need to do is register an account on  Trac. This is a prerequisite to getting commit access to our  GitHub repository, which is managed via  Trac credentials.

The following step is to send in a signed copy of the Parrot  Contributor License Agreement.  The instructions for sending it in are included in the document.  There can be some delay in the process of activating a commit bit after the  CLA is received, so try to get this done as soon as possible. In the meantime, you don't need a  CLA to submit patches so feel free to do so. Your GSoC mentor should be able to guide you on the patch submission process if you need any help, but the usual way is to open a  Trac ticket with the patch attached and then bug people on IRC until it's committed or you get some feedback.

Subscribing to parrot-commits and parrot-dev is highly recommended. parrot-commits sends you a message with a diff every time there's a git commit and parrot-dev is the place for general development discussion.  Most of the commit messages can be safely ignored, but they can provide some insight into how other developers work, and can help you gauge the community's general 'standard' for commit quality. If you want a good example to follow, chromatic is a good choice, he's a good coder and usually does a very good job of explaining code changes in the commit messages.

You will also be required to blog on a weekly basis, as a form of status report, on the  Parrot site. This is a Drupal instance for which you will need another set of credentials, separate from  Trac. The best way to get set up for blogging is to create an account on your own and then ask Coke on IRC to give you the right set of privileges. In case you can't get a hold of him, create a  Trac ticket for that task and assign it to him.

Attending the Parrot developers weekly #parrotsketch planning meetings are mandatory for all GSoC students, as that is the place where developers post 'status reports' letting everyone else know how their tasks are progressing and the weekly development priorities are set.  You should also explore the wiki a bit, but I guess you must already be doing it if you are here ;).

Some more data is available on  this post by dukeleto to the  tpf-gsoc-students list.