Janitors

The following tasks are intended to help people get started working with the Yocto Project. These tasks should not require a lot of context. Anyone with basic programming skills, experience working with Open Source software, and some time on their hands should be able to complete these.

When adding tasks, please be sure to follow this format:

* Task Title
** Difficulty: (Hard|Moderate|Easy)
** Estimate: 0-9 (Day|Hour)s?
** Submitter: IRC Handle
** Task item detail
** Task item detail

As these are meant to help people get started, tasks should be self-contained and doable without a lot of context dealing with bitbake based build systems. Re-writing the recipe parser in C is probably not a good fit for this task list.

Tasks

Kernel

• Build kernel modules on target
  • Difficulty: Moderate
  • Estimate: 3 Days
  • Submitter: dvhart
  • Package up the kernel sysroot and make it available on the target. This should become a linux-headers package or similar.

Build

• Ability to archive work dir
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Estimate: 2 Days
  • Submitter: LCS suggestion
  • Add the ability to archive the work directory to handle the GPL compliance issue.

Documentation

• Document undocumented variables according to bbvars.py
  • Difficulty: Moderate
  • Estimate: 1 Hour (per variable)
  • Submitter: dvhart
  • Start with the variables with the highest count
  • First add a doctag to meta/conf/documentation.conf
  • Second prepare a patch to documentation/poky-ref-manual/poky-ref-manual.xml

$ scripts/contrib/bbvars.py -d documentation/poky-ref-manual/poky-ref-manual.xml -t meta/conf/documentation.conf -m meta

• Rewrite bbvars.py to use bitbake to find variables
  • Difficulty: Hard
  • Estimate: 3 Days
  • Submitter: dvhart
  • bbvars.py does a rather dumb regex search for things vaguely resembling variables, the bitbake parser knows how to do this properly.

Compliance

• Fix compliance issues
  • Difficulty: Moderate
  • Estimate: 3 days
  • Submitter: jnfleisc
  • This is a task to address the compliance issues found when the LTP and POSIX compliance tests were run against a build created using Yocto Project.
  • The test results from running these tests against a build created using Yocto Project are at https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Posix_result and https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/LTP_result.

Style and Formatting

• Review recipes for compliance with the Recipe & Patch Style Guide
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Estimate: < 1 week
  • Submitter: paulbarker
  • Possibly look at reviving the old stylisation script (http://git.openembedded.org/openembedded/tree/contrib/oe-stylize.py). It would need bringing up-to-date with the current styleguide and then submitting to oe-core

• Convert short DESCRIPTION values (< 80 characters) to set SUMMARY instead
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Estimate: < 1 week
  • Submitter: paulbarker
  • Possibly write a script to use 'bitbake -e' to get the DESCRIPTION value and then check it's length

• Review naming of "files" directories
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Estimate: < 1 week
  • Submitter: paulbarker
  • If there is only one recipe in the containing directory (like x_0.bb and x_1.bb) the files directory should be called x, if the patches are only for version 1 of x then the files directory should be called x-1. Also check if the patches in it are still applied or only deadwood.
  • Possibly start by running "find -type d -name files" at the root of openembedded-core and meta-openembedded

• Run a spell checker on descriptive variables and comments
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Estimate: < 1 week
  • Submitter: paulbarker
  • Probably not the most interesting task!

Misc

• Write a friendly IRC bot for the #yocto channel
  • Difficultly: Moderate
  • Estimate: 1 Week (requires feedback and iterative development)
  • Submitter: dvhart
  • Possibly named "yocti"
  • The bot should be either snarky or obsequious
  • The bot should respond to at least the following commands:
    • yocti help (send help privately to user on commands)
    • yocti quiet (no more public output, should still respond to private msgs)
    • yocti speak (start responding again)
    • bug ### (provide a URL to the bug)
    • bzinfo ### (display the bug summary, and possibly whiteboard)
    • git ### (display the git commit subject)
    • bbvar VAR_NAME (display the doctag)
  • The bot could also respond to things like:
    • user++ (track kudos points per user per day)
    • user-- (remove kudos points)
    • kudos (display the current kudos scoreboard)
    • .*someday.* (suggest the user add a task to the Janitors list)
    • I'm sure there are more, current recipe version, maintainer of a recipe, etc.

Janitor entries in Bugzilla

None