For those of you looking to start helping JRuby along, here's a few open 1.0.2 bugs that would be pretty easy for a newb to look at. They'd also help you get your first taste of JRuby internals. Good eatin!

This should help get you started:

• How Easy Is It To Contribute To JRuby? Very Easy!

FYI: Most of these are also 1.1 bugs, so you'll be helping two releases at once (provided you fix them and provide patches for both branches, of course!)

• Array#== doesn't use custom to_ary method for RHS arguments

This is fairly simple, isolated core class code. Have a look at src/org/jruby/RubyArray.java

• 'Thread.main.exit!' and/or 'Kernel.exit!' does not work under certain circumstances

There's a patch here that looks pretty clean, but needs updating to apply cleanly to trunk and 1.0 branch.

• IO.sysopen not defined
• IO.open not defined

We have File.sysopen defined, but for some reason we don't have IO.sysopen. If you can't fix it, at least do some research as to *why*.

• Rubinius core/thread_spec failures

This one throws a NullPointerException, which are always really ugly, really broken, and usually really easy to figure out and fix. The spec in question is our (oldish) copy in test/externals/rubinius/spec/core.

• Calling IO.new with invalid file descriptor raises NativeException

This one just needs proper error handling, and there's a preliminary patch provided.

• IO.for_fd missing
• File.new does not support 3rd form (file descriptors)

I'm not sure if we can support these, but if we can we should. If we can't, we should raise an error. Either way it's probably not hard to resolve.

• String#unpack("Ux") does not handle multi-bytes correctly

There's a patch here that just needs a little more work.

• testTime.rb doesn't work correctly on some configuration

I don't even understand what's happening in this one, because I keep falling asleep reading the description. I think it's probably easy.

• TCPSocket.new(dest_adrr, dest_port, src_addr, src_port) missing from JRuby

Again, there's a patch here that appears to just need a bit more work.

• Range#step - strange behavior with alpha range, numeric step

This one has all the background work done on the JRuby side. We're simply not using the right algorithm for Range#step over character ranges. A quick peek at MRI source or a little insight on how to "just fix it" is all that's needed here, and the code is pretty simple. (Update: Fixed, thanks to Mathias Biilmann Christensen.)

• Attempting File.open('foo', 'w') when './foo' is a directory raises Errno:ERNOENT, but should raise Errno:EISDIR

This has a patch that's been applied to trunk, but it didn't apply cleanly to the 1.0 branch. Tidy it up, and it's done.

• Signal#trap doesn't work

...but Kernel#trap does. Huh? (Update: Fixed! Ola had already repaired it, but not closed the bug.)

• Array#pack fails for Q/q directives

This is pretty straightforward...we just don't have Q/q implemented. (Update: Fixed, thanks to Riley Lynch.)