Last Updated on September 26, 2024
Objectives
Joining the community is the best way to learn about the Yocto Project®, report bugs, stay up-to-date on the latest features, and learn from the excellent developers and testers within the Yocto Project®. This should give you some initial description of how to become part of our Yocto Project® community.
First steps
If you have not tried something like Openembedded or the Yocto Project® I suggest getting your hands dirty and going through the ”QuickStart Guide”. You might also want to browse ”What I Wish I’d Known”. Now you might have some more questions about how to do certain things.
How to get in touch
The Yocto Project® is a friendly community with maintainers, ambassadors, and other community members ready to help. There are several ways to get involved with the project – see here.
Mailing Lists & IRC
For community projects, it’s quite usual to communicate via mailing lists and IRC. Get yourself a new e-mail address, maybe one for each mailing list you want to join, to avoid cluttering your main e-mail address with potentially huge traffic coming in from your new lists. I’d recommend starting with the ”Yocto mailing list” for general questions and discussions. To send patches “upstream” (we’ll come to that later) use the ”Yocto mailing list” or OE mailing lists as appropriate. If you want some (compared to mailing lists) more immediate answers you might want to look at #yocto and #oe channels on libera chat. Some people respond more helpful on the one channel than the other. IRC Logs are available as well.
Monthly Technical Call
The Yocto Project® hosts a technical call on the first Tuesday of each month. All community members are invited to join on both the call and the IRC channel, which are used simultaneously. Join us at 15:00 GMT. In the US, this is 11 am ET, 10 am CT, 9 am MT, and 8 am PT.
Community Guidelines
The Community Guidelines should give you some direction on how to participate.
- Overview and General Guidelines
- Be nice
- Respect other people
- Keep it clean
- Be helpful
- Stay calm
- Keep it legal
- Adhere to Terms of Service
- Read Before Contributing – Search for existing answers
- Wiki Guidelines
- Mailing List Guidelines
- IRC Guidelines
- Bugzilla Guidelines
- Contribution Guidelines – Sending Patches
- Guideline Violations – 3 Strikes Method
Contact Us / Contact Us
For technical questions: Check out the Yocto Project® Wiki and the Documentation. I recommend browsing the ”Yocto Project® Mega-Manual” and the ”BitBake User Manual“. I usually read the latest versions of these manuals every summer in my holidays – please don’t judge me. If your questions are unanswered after reading the manuals, ask on mailing lists and IRC. If you found a bug feel free to send a patch for it on the relevant mailing list or post your findings to the “Yocto Project® Bugzilla” bug tracking system following the Bugzilla Guidelines. For everything else contact us here.
Participate
Open-source projects are built around participation. This is where you can access repositories, file a bug, read information on the wiki, or see the results of nightly builds.
Source Repositories
Various Source Repositories including ”Poky”, ”Poky Support”, ”Yocto Metadata Layers”, ”Yocto Tools”, ”IDE Plugins”, ”Matchbox”, ”Misc”, ”Sato”, ”User Contributions”, ”Yocto Linux Kernel”, ”Yocto Metadata Layer Archive” and ”Yocto Tools Archive” can be found here. If you need even more recipes check the ”OpenEmbedded Layer Index”.
Bugzilla
Unlike closed source projects we are happy about you reporting errors. We’ll look into every issue and try to resolve it. We might need your help to be able to reproduce the error. Please monitor e-mails for cases you reported or where you added your e-mail, which are sent out by the Yocto Project ”Bugzilla” error tracking system. Create an account here, follow the ”Bugzilla Guidelines” and post!
Wiki
We already saw before the ”Yocto Wiki”. Have a look at ”Technical FAQ”, ”Tips and tricks” and ”Working Behind a Network Proxy” in case you need something like that.
Autobuilder
The ”Yocto Project® Autobuilder” is a project to automate build tests and Quality Assurance. One of the most neglected areas of open-source development is testing and Quality Assurance. A goal of the Yocto Project® is to lead the industry in being the first open-source project that targets embedded developers who
- publish their QA and testing plans
- demonstrate their testing and QA in public
- and develop tools to automate test and QA procedures for the benefit of everyone
Contribute
Thousands of people contribute to the Yocto Project® to make it a success. This is how you can contribute your code or find other ways to contribute – see here.
Contribution Guidelines
Check out the ”Commit Patch Message Guidelines”.
Submit a Patch
Check out ”Styleguide”, ”Commit Patch Message Guidelines” and ”How to submit a patch to OpenEmbedded”.
Submit a Job Posting
We’d be happy to link to your job listing here.
Join the Project
Here you learn more about how to join the Yocto Project, if you are ready to join contact the Linux Foundation directly.
Social media
Have a look at ”Stack Overflow”, ”Facebook”, ”Linkedin”, ”Twitter”, (shameless self-promotion follows) ”Twitter – Yocto Training”, and ”Blogspot”.
Events
We live in a world where we work remotely and communicate on IRC, mailing lists and video chats, but it’s still important to meet when possible in person. Meet many great people from our community at those events. Typically there is a ”Yocto Project Developer Day” the day after the ELC(E).
Conclusion
Those are just some initial hints of how to become part of our Yocto Project® community.
Appendix
For a blog post that describes how to build the upstream kernel without the Yocto Project® have a look here. If you want to learn how Embedded Linux works have a look here. To learn more about the Yocto Project® have a look here.
