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As an open source project, Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded welcomes anyone to contribute. You can make contributions through testing, bug fixing and helping out on feature development and more at any time.  Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded grow and evolve through community contributions — and we are grateful for you!

Contributing to Yocto Project isn’t just limited to writing code. Helping new users on the mailing list, advocacy and improving documentation are always welcome 🙂

Community Values

In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, contributors and maintainers pledge to make participation in our project and community a harassment-free experience for everyone. 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.

Ways to Contribute

Contributor Guide

Report Bugs

No one likes bugs. You can use the Yocto Project instance of Bugzilla to submit a defect (bug) against BitBake, OpenEmbedded-Core, against any other Yocto Project component or for tool issues. For additional information on this implementation of Bugzilla see the “Yocto Project Bugzilla” section in the Yocto Project Reference Manual. For more detail on any of the following steps, see the Yocto Project Bugzilla wiki page.

Answer questions on the mailing list and IRC

Answering questions is an excellent and visible way to help the community, which also demonstrates your expertise. Contributors should subscribe to the mailing lists of their choosing and follow it in order to keep up to date on what’s happening with Yocto Project.

Request new features

New feature requests should be applied through Bugzilla as a bug. Users should set the Severity to Enhancement. The request will be triaged in the Triage Team meetings. There are two important feature request review times per year, in March and September (2 months before final release). The Triage team decides which new features to include in the next release (in April and October).

Fix bugs and submit patches

Look through Bugzilla for bugs or help wanted. If you have a fix for an issue you’ve run into, submit a patch.

Build new features

If you would like to help with feature development, please check Yocto Project Bugzilla for ‘Enhancement’ (severity) bugs. We track all new features in Bugzilla with these ‘Enhancement’ bugs. If you see something that is interesting, please feel free to contact the owner and see how you can help there.

Testing + QA

Most of the QA related information can be found here. If you would like to help testing the system, some features, or testing Yocto on different Linux distributions, please feel free to contact the TSC.

Support Yocto Project at an Event

Yocto Project community members participate in events by representing Yocto Project in the booth (bonus: Yocto Project Members can present demos from our booth too!). Check out our Events page and email yocto-advocacy@lists.yoctoproject.org with the event you are interested in supporting.