Heidelberg sprint report 22nd-29th August 
============================================= 

The heidelberg sprint was announced_ late July 
and around `13 people registered`_ and showed up
at the nice Heidelberg physics institute where 
Carl Friedrich Bolz had organized sprint facilities 
for us. 

The sprint was focused on getting a `0.7.0 release out`_ and
improve and refine crucial areas like threading, GC and
CPython compliancy.  Here is what people worked on in a
somewhat chronological non-particular order and certainly
not complete: 

- Samuele and Carl worked on refactoring the parts of genc
  that are responsible for the use of refcounting in the translation to make
  it possible to compile with a different GC strategy. It turned out that
  refcounting is kind of deeply embedded into genc so it took a lot
  of time to introduce sensible hooks that other GCs could use.

- Armin and Richard changed genc so that it can handle 
  locks as external objects that Armin had to introduce to 
  implement threading in PyPy. For now we have a simple GIL but it is not
  deeply implanted in the interpreter so we should be able to
  change that later. After two days of hacking they were finished 
  although some more translation related issues popped up and
  were fixed. 

- Holger continously prepared the release infrastructure and refactored
  the website and documentation to allow it to be presented 
  by version in the future.  For the next time, we will nevertheless
  continue to use only "dist" as we don't expect interesting 
  or neccessaries branches/splits of documentation or website
  content. 

- Anders L. and Jacob worked on compliancy worked on compliancy: 
  they fixed some failing tests related to unicode and codecs 
  and binascii. 

- Initially Ludovic and Nik worked on making more parts of our
  compiler RPython and Ludovic continued this effort on "astcompiler" 
  for some days before he focused on fixing compiler compliancy
  bugs along with Holger and Samuele and a host of others 
  who had fun with CPython's somewhat non-compliant compiler
  package. 

- Laura continued working on a docstring exctraction tool
  and cared for getting docstrings into PyPy builtin 
  type objects. 

- Niklaus Heidimann moved his _sre implementation 
  *incrementally* to interpreter level and succeeded 
  to have it fully running and translateable for the
  release! 

- Richard Emslie and Eric van Riet Paap continously worked 
  on improving and fixing LLVM.  They succeeded in reusing 
  genc's external function implementations but had to setup
  a build indirection  via codespeak: to compile llvm-files 
  source code is sent to a CGI on codespeak and the result
  is sent back to the client.  This makes it easier for
  people who don't have a CVS version of LLVM installed. 
  They discovered and communicated with llvm-dev about 
  LLVM bugs.  In the end they managed they managed to 
  have a full LLVM backend documented and running for 
  the 0.7.0 release! 

- Christian worked on implementing various external functions 
  and hacked a "fakecompiler" compilation with the translated 
  pypy-c that delegates bytecode compilation to a python 
  process. The idea was to have running of tests on the 
  translated PyPy work. Christian also worked on fixing
  the build process for win32. 

- Many of us worked on the break day (which just was too rainy) 
  and increased test compliancy by 10%, fixing and tackling 
  numerous issues.  Anders C. was one of the person who 
  continously worked on classifying and fixing core tests. 
  holger with help from Niklaus fixed a couple of conftest 
  compliancy-testing related bugs. 

- Ludovic and Holger refactored the compiler and parser option 
  handling and added a README.compiling to make things slightly 
  less obscure.  

- Armin, Samuele and others refactored the translation entry
  points  and also made the pypy-c/pypy-llvm entry points nicer
  (adding --info and --version options).  Samuele also unified 
  the way we specify which app/mixed modules should be used. 

- Carl Friedrich and Holger updated a lot of documentation and  
  release issues, worked on getting-started, wrote the release 
  announcement, the LICENSE files and checked that examples still 
  work and make sense. 

- Carl also quickly implemented the 'errno' mixed module. 

- Bea worked on coordination and management issues
  and wrote a document describing our sprint development 
  process. She also worked on a "dissemination plan" 
  and talked to various interested parties regarding 
  their plans for the future.  She also convened with
  Jacob and Stephan on monday to talk about management
  responsibilities in the near future.  There now is the 
  "3rd amendment" to the EU contract scheduled for 
  7th September.  
  
- Holger and Bea listed the steps required for getting 
  Michael Hudson on the project through the University 
  of Bristol.  Later on the management team met 
  and evaluated the results of the EU-workshop organized
  by Changemaker in Goteborg. 

On sunday afternoon (basically the last day where mostly 
everbody was there) we had a kind of sprint-conclusion 
and what to do next meeting, originally planned as 
the technical board meeting.  There we talked about
the next areas for cleanup (partly listed in this 
`pypy-dev mail`_). 

.. _`13 people registered`: http://codespeak.net/pypy/extradoc/sprintinfo/heidelberg-people.html
.. _`announced`: http://codespeak.net/pypy/extradoc/sprintinfo/Heidelberg-sprint.html
.. _`0.7.0 release out`: http://codespeak.net/pipermail/pypy-dev/2005q3/002294.html
.. _`pypy-dev mail`: http://codespeak.net/pipermail/pypy-dev/2005q3/002301.html