Community Guidelines

Note: Highlighted items require links to be added. Dawn will add links as those pages become available.

Overview and General Guidlines

We want to keep the Yocto Community a great place to participate, but we need your help to keep it that way. While we have specific guidelines for various tools, in general, you should:

• Be nice: Be courteous and polite to fellow members of the list.
• Respect other people: No regional, racial, gender or other abuse will be tolerated.
• Keep it clean: Keep the language clean (no swearing)
• Be helpful: Be patient with new people and be willing to jump in to answer questions.
• Stay calm: The written word is always subject to interpretation, so give people the benefit of the doubt and try not to let emotions get out of control.
• Keep it legal: Make sure that you have the legal right to post your content and are not violating copyright or other laws.
• Adhere to Terms of Service: All community contributions are also subject to our Terms of Service

Read Before Contributing - Search for existing answers

IMPORTANT: Before you contribute, be sure that you have done a thorough search to see if your question has already been answered. We've already answered many questions, and you will get a better response from people if you have already done your due diligence to find obvious or partial answers.

• Search this wiki
• Search our mailing lists
• Search the yoctoproject.com website

Wiki Guidelines

You can learn more about our documentation on the Yocto website, and if you are unfamiliar with MediaWiki syntax, we have a short how-to document with instructions for Using the Wiki.

Creating articles in the wiki is a collaborative process. After you have written your piece others may:

• Edit
• Alter
• Adapt
• Add

So don't worry about making your article perfect the first time through. Don't hesitate to add content you think is useful and don't hesitate to make edits where you think you can help. There's always somebody to fix anything that breaks.

Posting Guidelines

Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when using the Yocto wiki:

• Search first: Before creating a new page or making significant contributions to a page, please do a quick search to make sure that you aren't duplicating existing content on the wiki or other areas on the Yocto Project website.
• Contribute: The wiki is a resource for anyone to use. Just keep the content relevant, that is anything related to Yocto as long as it meets our other guidelines should be appropriate.
• Make improvements: If you find a typo or inaccurate information, just fix it.
• Respect links: Please provide redirects when you move content. Many people use the wiki and may have created bookmarks or linked to your content.

The Wiki is Public

Everything in the wiki is public.

Every edit and every new page created goes into the recent changes feed, which means that people will see your edits even if you haven't yet linked to a page.

Once it's out there, it's public.

• Technically, administrators can delete things, but the wiki content may be mirrored, has feeds and is in the Google cache, so deleting something doesn't make it go away.
• When you delete content from a page, the original content will still remain in the history for that page.

Mailing List Guidelines

More information about our mailing lists can be found on the Yocto website.

Keep It Short

Remember that thousands of copies of your message will exist in mailboxes:

• Keep your messages as short as possible.
• Avoid including log output (select only the most relevant lines, or place the log on a website or in a pastebin instead)
• Don't excessively quote previous messages in the thread (trim the quoted text down to the most recent/relevant messages only).

Use Proper Posting Style

• No HTML or Rich Text: Set your mailer to send only plain text messages to avoid getting caught in our spam filters.
• Do not top post: Top posting is replying to a message on "top" of the quoted text of the previous correspondence. This is highly unwanted in mailing lists because it increases the size of the daily digests to be sent out & is highly confusing and incoherent. By default, most email clients top post. Please, remove the irrelevant part of the previous communication(in case of more than a single correspondence) and use bottom, interleaved posting.
• Using interleaved posting: Bottom, interleaved posting is replying to the relevant parts of the previous correspondence just below the block(s) of sentences. For a comment to another block of sentences of the same quoted text, you should move below that relevant block again. Do not reply below the whole of the quoted text. Also remove any irrelevant text.
• Use links: Please provide URLs to articles wherever possible. Avoid cutting and pasting whole articles especially considering the fact that all may not be interested.
• Don't include attached files: Instead of including attached files, please upload your file to the this wiki or another website and post a link to the file from your email message.

Do Not Hijack Threads

Post new questions or new topics as new threads (new email message). Please do not reply to a random thread with a new question or start an unrelated topic of conversation in an existing thread. This creates confusion and makes it much less likely that you will get a response.

Do Not Cross Post

Avoid posting to multiple lists simultaneously. Pick a mailing list that is most suitable for your post and just use that. CC'ing multiple lists should be avoided.

Subscribers Only

Only subscribers can post to our mailing lists. If you would like to contribute to our mailing lists, we think it is only fair that you be a subscriber. Please note that if you want to participate only occasionally, you can subscribe to a list and set your email options to digest or no mail and read the web archives when you want to catch up.

Additional Resources

• Mailing list guidelines by Shakthi Kannan (PDF): Great guideline summary and examples of posting styles.

IRC Guidelines

More information about our IRC channels can be found on the Yocto website.

Here are a few IRC guidelines:

• Don't post chunks: Avoid posting big chunks of text - use pastebin or a similar service to shorten it to a link.
• Register your Nickname: To avoid confusion and make sure you always have the same name on IRC, you should register your nick.
• Pick the right channel: if you aren't sure, you should start in our main #yocto channel.
• More information: this IRC primer for new users and the general IRC guidelines from freenode are also useful resources.
• Web access: If you don't normally use IRC and want to try it out, you can use the freenode Web IRC chat.

Bugzilla Guidelines

We like to have fun but we also like the communications to run smoothly. To that end here are some guidelines for participating in the Yocto Bugzilla.

• Be patient with others: Sometimes people post imperfect bug reports. In case of missing information kindly tell reporters how to provide it, and/or suggest what they can do to improve the bug report.
• Stay on topic: Don't start endless debates on topics not directly related to the scope of a specific bug report.
• Use proper quoting practices: Avoid quoting complete previous comments by stripping unneeded lines, and avoid answering above the quoted text.

What to do if you find a bug

• Search first: Try to avoid filing duplicates by searching to see whether your issue has already been filed.
• Ask: You can ask on our mailing lists or IRC channels to see if anyone has seen this issue before to gather more details or see if someone has a workaround.
• Submit a bug report: Give us as many details as possible about what happened and how your issue can be reproduced.
• Track our progress: Get feedback from the development community and track resolution status.
• Provide a fix: Use the tools, project wiki and git source repository in the Yocto Project to fix the problem yourself.

Learn more about reporting bugs and our process for submitting patches.

Guideline Violations - 3 Strikes Method

The point of this section is not to find opportunities to punish people, but we do need a fair way to deal with people who are making our community an unpleasant place.

• First occurrence: Public reminder that the behavior is inappropriate according to our guidelines.
• Second occurrence: Private message warning the user that any additional violations will result in removal from the community.
• Third occurrence: Depending on the violation, may include account deletion or banning.

Notes:

• Obvious spammers are banned on first occurrence. This is necessary to keep the community free of spam.
• Violations are forgiven after 6 months of good behavior.
• Minor formatting / style infractions will be dealt with through education, not the 3 strikes process.
• Extreme violations of a threatening, abusive, destructive or illegal nature will be addressed immediately and are not subject to 3 strikes.
• Contact Dawn Foster to report abuse or appeal violations (mistakes happen & will be corrected).

Credits

• MeeGo Community Guidelines were the basis for the Yocto Guidelines used under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
• Fedora Mailing List Guidelines used as a starting point under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.