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.

Misc

• Modify create-pull-request and send-pull-request to use git-request-pull directly.
  • Difficulty: Easy
  • Estimate: 1 Day
  • Submitter: dvhart
  • The output of git-request-pull should be used to pre-populate the cover-letter, leaving the BLURB string in tact.
  • The URL should be harvested from the user's environment so that the script can be used with poky, oe-core, as well as other layers.
  • I wouldn't necessarily object to removing the alternative sending mechanism and make the script depend completely on git tools.

• Write a friendly IRC bot for the #yocto channel
  • Difficultly: Moderate
  • Estimage: 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.