Update from October 2009: this blog post is of historical interest only, the updated, official instructions on how to install Rakudo can be found here. If you want to build Rakudo, that's where you should look these days.

There has been some profund confusion over the whereabouts of the Rakudo source code repository. Since we've seen no official announcement on rakudo.org I wrote a short guide on how to build Rakudo.

The Parrot svn repository move to parrot.org (formerly perl.org), and at the same time Rakudo left the Parrot repository.

It now lives on Github (and has been migrated to git).

You can obtain a copy with

git clone git://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git

(Please note that the http:// currently does not work, you have to use git://).

For people with commit access it is recommended to use the clone URL git@github.com:rakudo/rakudo.git instead.

Building Git

There are two ways to build Rakudo.

First way: Rakudo under Parrot

First obtain a copy of parrot (if you already have one, you may of course omit this step) and build it.

svn co https://svn.parrot.org/parrot/trunk parrot cd parrot/ perl Configure.pl make

Then clone Rakudo to the subdirectory languages/rakudo , configure and build it:

cd languages/ git clone git://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git cd rakudo perl Configure.pl make make spectest # please report any failures from this # step to rakudobug@perl.org

Second way: Parrot under Rakudo

You can reverse the order of the nesting of Parrot and Rakudo directories:

git clone git://github.com/rakudo/rakudo.git cd rakudo svn co https://svn.parrot.org/parrot/trunk parrot cd parrot/ perl Configure.pl make cd .. # back in Rakudo's clone perl Configure.pl make make spectest

Update:: Chris Dolan also provided a nice explanation of how to use github's "fork" feature to create patches. That's the gittish way, and very convenient.