Contributing

Mailing list

The main communication tool in use is the Yocto Project mailing list:

Feel free to ask any kind of questions but please always prepend your email subject with [meta-raspberrypi] as this is the global Yocto mailing list and not a dedicated meta-raspberrypi mailing list.

Formatting patches

First and foremost, all of the contributions to the layer must be compliant with the standard openembedded patch guidelines:

In summary, your commit log messages should be formatted as follows:

<layer-component>: <short log/statement of what needed to be changed>

(Optional pointers to external resources, such as defect tracking)

The intent of your change.

(Optional: if it's not clear from above, how your change resolves
the issues in the first part)

Signed-off-by: Your Name <yourname@youremail.com>

The <layer-component> is the layer component name that your changes affect. It is important that you choose it correctly. A simple guide for selecting a a good component name is the following:

  • For changes that affect layer recipes, please just use the base names of the affected recipes, separated by commas (,), as the component name. For example: use omxplayer instead of omxplayer_git.bb. If you are adding new recipe(s), just use the new recipe(s) base name(s). An example for changes to multiple recipes would be userland,vc-graphics,wayland.
  • For changes that affect the layer documentation, please just use docs as the component name.
  • For changes that affect other files, i.e. under the conf directory, please use the full path as the component name, e.g. conf/layer.conf.
  • For changes that affect the layer itself and do not fall into any of the above cases, please use meta-raspberrypi as the component name.

A full example of a suitable commit log message is below:

foobar: Adjusted the foo setting in bar

When using foobar on systems with less than a gigabyte of RAM common
usage patterns often result in an Out-of-memory condition causing
slowdowns and unexpected application termination.

Low-memory systems should continue to function without running into
memory-starvation conditions with minimal cost to systems with more
available memory.  High-memory systems will be less able to use the
full extent of the system, a dynamically tunable option may be best,
long-term.

The foo setting in bar was decreased from X to X-50% in order to
ensure we don't exhaust all system memory with foobar threads.

Signed-off-by: Joe Developer <joe.developer@example.com>

A common issue during patch reviewing is commit log formatting, please review the above formatting guidelines carefully before sending your patches.

Sending patches

The preferred method to contribute to this project is to send pull requests to the GitHub mirror of the layer:

In addition, you may send patches for review to the above specified mailing list. In this case, when creating patches using git please make sure to use the following formatting for the message subject:

git format-patch -s --subject-prefix='meta-raspberrypi][PATCH' origin

Then, for sending patches to the mailing list, you may use this command:

git send-email --to yocto@yoctoproject.org <generated patch>

GitHub issues

In order to manage and track the layer issues more efficiently, the GitHub issues facility is used by this project:

If you submit patches that have a GitHub issue associated, please make sure to use standard GitHub keywords, e.g. closes, resolves or fixes, before the "Signed-off-by" tag to close the relevant issues automatically:

foobar: Adjusted the foo setting in bar

Fixes: #324

Signed-off-by: Joe Developer <joe.developer@example.com>

More information on the available GitHub close keywords can be found here: