Issue Management

Bugs, feature requests and other things we need to do are tracked as Github issues. Issues can be of various types and in various states, and also belong to milestones or not. This page is an attempt to document the current practice.

Labels

Issues without labels are undecided - that is, we don’t yet know if it’s a bug, a configuration issue, a feature request or what. Issues that are invalid for whatever reason are closed with a short explanation of why. Examples include “Duplicate of #123”, “Discovered to be configuration error”, “Rendered moot by #123” and so on. We don’t use the “invalid” or “wontfix” labels.

  • android - Marks an issue as occurring on the Android platform only.

  • bug - The issue is a verified bug.

  • build - The issue is caused by or requires changes to the build system (scripts or Docker image).

  • docs - Something requires documenting.

  • easy - This could be easily fixed, probably an hour’s work or less. These issues are good starting points for new contributors.

  • enhancement - This is a new feature or an improvement of some kind, as opposed to a problem (bug).

  • help-wanted - The core team can’t or won’t do this, but someone else is welcome to. This does not mean that help is not wanted on the other issues. You can see this as a soft wontfix. (A hard wontfix is simply a close with a short explanation why.)

  • pr-bugfix - This pull request fixes a bug. This is different from the bug label, as there may also be pull requests with for example tests that prove a bug which would then be labeled bug.

  • pr-refactor - This pull request is a refactoring, i.e. not supposed to change behavior.

  • pr-wait-or-pending - This pull request is not ready for merging, even if the tests pass and it looks good. It is incomplete or requires more discussion.

  • protocol - This requires a change to the protocol.

Milestone

There are milestones for major and sometimes minor versions. An issues being assigned to a milestone means it is a blocker - the release can’t be made without the issue being closed. Issues not assigned to a milestone can be handled whenever.

Assignee

Users can be assigned to issues. We don’t usually do so. Sometimes someone assigns themself to an issue to indicate “I’m working on this” to avoid others doing so too. It’s not mandatory.

Locking

We don’t normally lock issues (prevent further discussion on them). There are some exceptions though;

  • “Popular” issues that attract lots of “me too” and “+1” comments. These are noise and annoy people with useless notifications via mail and in the Github interface. Once the issue is clear and it suffers from this symptom I may lock it.

  • Contentious bikeshedding discussions. After two sides in a discussion have clarified their points, there is no point arguing endlessly about it. As above, this may get closed.

  • Duplicates. Once an issue has been identified as a duplicate of another issue, it may be locked to prevent further discussion there. The intention is to move the discussion to the other (referenced) issue, while someone just doing a search and jumping on the first match might otherwise resurrect discussion in the duplicate.