Many languages are in the parrot repository, to show, as we add more and more features, how to implement languages. As parrot nears 1.0, these languages are encouraged to leave the nest and find their own repositories. We may keep some educational "how to" languages in the repository as guides for new language developers.

Here are some tips for finding your own place (basically, "this is what  partcl did.")

What do you rely on parrot's infrastructure for?

Ticketing? Mailing lists? Version control?

If you're not sure where to go for these things, I recommend setting up a new project using googlecode. The project will give you a ticketing system, a wiki, a subversion repository; you can easily setup mailing lists via google groups.

You don't even need to setup your own repository. If you have a small language and don't need much in the way of infrastructure, you can join  squawk and share that repository. This option probably makes sense for the smaller languages.

When partcl left, we abandoned our svn history.

Licensing

We kept the same licensing and copyright as parrot to keep things simple.

Working with parrot once you're out of the repository

See  http://code.google.com/p/partcl/wiki/PartclSource - We have two versions of the project, one to work against a specific release version of parrot (hopefully the latest), and another to work against trunk. This insulates your users from changes in your code or parrot's code, and lets you work against a stable version without having things change out from under you. We

Don't rely on top level Configure

Grab a copy of another language's Configure.pl, copy into your directory and update it for your language. This allows you to regenerate your makefile without relying on a top level Configure.pl run.

As you leave

Once you're in your repository, you should remove your language from the parrot repository. Don't forget to remove your language from the languages makefile and initial configuration.

Moving to github.com: How Eclectus did it

 http://github.com is another option for where to fly to after leaving the nest. That's what I, barney, did for Eclectus.

Create your local git repository

Mark Glines is maintaining a readonly mirror of the trunk of Parrot's svn repository. This means that the commit history of trunk, but not the branches, is available. Relax, the bulk of the work is already done.

cd ~
mkdir git
cd git
git clone git://squawk.glines.org/parrot-trunk
cd parrot-trunk
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter languages/eclectus/

Create an empty repository on github.com

For using the public plan you need to supply an username, your Email-adress and a public SSH-key. After that I followed the instructions and created an empty repository called 'eclectus'.

Push your local repository onto github

Pushing the project onto github can then be done with:

git remote rm origin
git remote add origin git@github.com:bschmalhofer/eclectus.git
git remote show origin
git status
git push origin master

See the result on  http://github.com/bschmalhofer/eclectus/tree/master.

Licensing

As license I choose to stay with Artistic 2.0.

Copyright

Nor sure, whether copyright messages should be added.

Removal from the SVN repository

Remove the language from svn by doing 'ack-grep eclectus' and remove the references to the language. The language directory can be deleted with 'svn del languages/eclectus'. Also I edited the svn:ignore list: 'svn pe svn:ignore languages', as eclectus will be checked out into 'languages'.

Tell the world about it

Edit https://trac.parrot.org/parrot/wiki/Languages and write about it in your blog.