How to get started?

Currently helping might be difficult, but I'm glad you're interested! :)

I haven't had a lot of time to work on pycorn lately, and I'm currently "stuck" on a fairly big problem: the way it gets built is fragile and overly complicated. I'm trying to come up with a better build method, but it's difficult...

I have no idea if the current build system actually works on Windows. You would need to use cygwin to build, and you probably need to have the default python be 2.5.5 (or at least something in 2.5) because one of the current issues with the build system is that it assumes the system's python produces bytecode compatible with the version of python it's building into pycorn, and there is no such compatibility guarantee unless the python versions are the same :)

So, the first step if you want to help at this stage would be to see if you can build and run it. You will also need some kind of windows build of qemu in order to run it, unless you happen to own a gumstix verdex board or are willing to do a port to a different ARM device (which would be kinda easy at this point, since all it currently requires is a serial driver and a linker script, but probably tricky if you've not done embedded stuff).

Alternatively, you could try and find me a tool to use to build it in a better way, I guess ;) Solving this problem would give me much more motivation to do more actual work on the code proper... the issue is that make-like systems don't really adapt well to being used to build a bunch of separate packages and then integrating the output of them into a "distribution", and the distribution build systems which exist (such as bitbake) tend to be extremely closely tied to the distribution they were written to build (openembedded, for bitbake) and the process of using them for something *else* isn't documented particularly well.