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.

api

Issues or pull requests that change public APIs (config, REST). Used to highlight these specifically in the release notes, and ensure we don’t miss to bump the minor version.

bug

A problem with current functionality, as opposed to missing functionality (enhancement).

build

Issues caused by or requiring changes to the build system (scripts or Docker image).

dependencies

Pull requests that update a dependency file.

documentation

Issues related to the documentation.

enhancement

New features or improvements of some kind, as opposed to a problem (bug).

frozen-due-to-age

Set automatically on issues when they have been closed untouched for a long time, together with being locked for discussion.

good first issue

Good starting points for new contributors, contained in scope and size, and clear about what is the desired outcome.

needs-triage

New issues needed to be validated.

not-our-bug

Rare and temporary label used only when we want to keep an issue open for visibility, but the real problem is somewhere else.

pr-merged

Legacy label used in the past for pull requests merged to the main tree.

protocol

Issues that require a change to the protocol.

skip-changelog

Set on bugs that have never been in a released stable version, i.e. a bug introduced in v1.8.0-rc.1 and fixed in v1.8.0-rc.2, and as such excluded from the release notes for v1.8.0.

ui

Issues related to the graphical user interface.

waiting-for-info

Issues that require more information from the author on how to reproduce.

Milestones

Each released version gets a milestone. Issues that are resolved and will be released as that version get added to the milestone. The release notes are based on the issues present in the milestone.

In addition to version specific milestones there are two generic ones:

Planned

This issue is being worked on, or will soon be worked on, by someone in the core team. Expect action on it within the next few days, weeks or months.

Unplanned (Contributions Welcome)

This issue is not being worked on by the core team, and we don’t plan on doing so in the foreseeable future. We still consider it a valid issue and welcome contributions towards resolving it.

Issues lacking a milestone are currently undecided. In practice this is similar to Unplanned in that probably no-one is working on it, but we are still considering it and it may end up Planned or closed instead.

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.