16 Contributions and Additional Information

16.1 Introduction

The Yocto Project team is happy for people to experiment with the Yocto Project. A number of places exist to find help if you run into difficulties or find bugs. This presents information about contributing and participating in the Yocto Project.

16.2 Contributions

The Yocto Project gladly accepts contributions. You can submit changes to the project either by creating and sending pull requests, or by submitting patches through email. For information on how to do both as well as information on how to identify the maintainer for each area of code, see the “Submitting a Change to the Yocto Project” section in the Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual.

16.3 Yocto Project Bugzilla

The Yocto Project uses its own implementation of Bugzilla to track defects (bugs). Implementations of Bugzilla work well for group development because they track bugs and code changes, can be used to communicate changes and problems with developers, can be used to submit and review patches, and can be used to manage quality assurance.

Sometimes it is helpful to submit, investigate, or track a bug against the Yocto Project itself (e.g. when discovering an issue with some component of the build system that acts contrary to the documentation or your expectations).

A general procedure and guidelines exist for when you use Bugzilla to submit a bug. For information on how to use Bugzilla to submit a bug against the Yocto Project, see the following:

The “Submitting a Defect Against the Yocto Project” section in the Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual.
The Yocto Project Bugzilla wiki page

For information on Bugzilla in general, see http://www.bugzilla.org/about/.

16.4 Mailing lists

A number of mailing lists maintained by the Yocto Project exist as well as related OpenEmbedded mailing lists for discussion, patch submission and announcements. To subscribe to one of the following mailing lists, click on the appropriate URL in the following list and follow the instructions:

https://lists.yoctoproject.org/g/yocto - General Yocto Project discussion mailing list.
https://lists.openembedded.org/g/openembedded-core - Discussion mailing list about OpenEmbedded-Core (the core metadata).
https://lists.openembedded.org/g/openembedded-devel - Discussion mailing list about OpenEmbedded.
https://lists.openembedded.org/g/bitbake-devel - Discussion mailing list about the BitBake build tool.
https://lists.yoctoproject.org/g/poky - Discussion mailing list about Poky.
https://lists.yoctoproject.org/g/yocto-announce - Mailing list to receive official Yocto Project release and milestone announcements.

For more Yocto Project-related mailing lists, see the Yocto Project Website.

16.5 Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Two IRC channels on freenode are available for the Yocto Project and Poky discussions:

#yocto
#poky

16.6 Links and Related Documentation

Here is a list of resources you might find helpful:

The Yocto Project Website: The home site for the Yocto Project.
The Yocto Project Main Wiki Page: The main wiki page for the Yocto Project. This page contains information about project planning, release engineering, QA & automation, a reference site map, and other resources related to the Yocto Project.
OpenEmbedded: The build system used by the Yocto Project. This project is the upstream, generic, embedded distribution from which the Yocto Project derives its build system (Poky) and to which it contributes.
BitBake: The tool used to process metadata.
BitBake User Manual: A comprehensive guide to the BitBake tool. If you want information on BitBake, see this manual.
Yocto Project Quick Build : This short document lets you experience building an image using the Yocto Project without having to understand any concepts or details.
Yocto Project Overview and Concepts Manual : This manual provides overview and conceptual information about the Yocto Project.
Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual : This manual is a “how-to” guide that presents procedures useful to both application and system developers who use the Yocto Project.
Yocto Project Application Development and the Extensible Software Development Kit (eSDK) manual : This guide provides information that lets you get going with the standard or extensible SDK. An SDK, with its cross-development toolchains, allows you to develop projects inside or outside of the Yocto Project environment.
Board Support Packages (BSP) - Developer’s Guide : This guide defines the structure for BSP components. Having a commonly understood structure encourages standardization.
Yocto Project Linux Kernel Development Manual : This manual describes how to work with Linux Yocto kernels as well as provides a bit of conceptual information on the construction of the Yocto Linux kernel tree.
Yocto Project Reference Manual : This manual provides reference material such as variable, task, and class descriptions.
Yocto Project Mega-Manual: This manual is simply a single HTML file comprised of the bulk of the Yocto Project manuals. The Mega-Manual primarily exists as a vehicle by which you can easily search for phrases and terms used in the Yocto Project documentation set.
Yocto Project Profiling and Tracing Manual : This manual presents a set of common and generally useful tracing and profiling schemes along with their applications (as appropriate) to each tool.
Toaster User Manual : This manual introduces and describes how to set up and use Toaster. Toaster is an Application Programming Interface (API) and web-based interface to the OpenEmbedded Build System, which uses BitBake, that reports build information.
FAQ: A list of commonly asked questions and their answers.
Release Notes: Features, updates and known issues for the current release of the Yocto Project. To access the Release Notes, go to the Downloads page on the Yocto Project website and click on the “RELEASE INFORMATION” link for the appropriate release.
Bugzilla: The bug tracking application the Yocto Project uses. If you find problems with the Yocto Project, you should report them using this application.
Bugzilla Configuration and Bug Tracking Wiki Page: Information on how to get set up and use the Yocto Project implementation of Bugzilla for logging and tracking Yocto Project defects.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC): Two IRC channels on freenode are available for Yocto Project and Poky discussions: #yocto and #poky, respectively.
Quick EMUlator (QEMU): An open-source machine emulator and virtualizer.