Bug Tracking

YaST team is quite busy delivering new features and, of course, fixing bugs. The main development process is driven by SCRUM and sometimes bugs don't fit in that process. So this document is intended to describe how bugs should be handled.

Basically, YaST team receives bug reports through SUSE's bugzilla. When a new YaST bug is registered, it is assigned to the yast-maintainers mailing list. Inside the YaST team, there is a person who is responsible for taking a look at those reports and assigning them to the right developer in order to solve them. Just as a side note, the person in charge of this mailing list changes periodically in a rotating way. The list of assigned people is available internally.

When a bug is assigned to a developer, he/she will be the responsible for deciding how to handle the resolution of that issue.

  • If the developer considers the bug simple or small enough, she will keep it assigned to themselves and will work on it outside of the main YaST development process. The main reason to do that is to work-around the overhead imposed by SCRUM for such small bugs.
  • If it's deadly urgent (P1, L3 or confirmed by the PO), the developer will submit the bug to the current sprint to the respective Trello team board (Team A board, Team 1 board) and mark the card as a fast-track and under-waterline item. Then it will be handled (and fixed) during the current sprint.
  • If the bug is bigger but not that urgent, the developer will add the bug to the incoming board so it could be fixed in upcoming sprints. At this point, the bug should be assigned to yast-internal until some developer starts working on it.

Finally, openSUSE could be affected by some issues that won't be fixed by YaST team (not so critical ones). Those bugs will be assigned to yast-community so any community member interested in YaST development could take care of them. After all, YaST is Open.

Security issues

There are very few security issues in YaST (you need to be already root when running it and can be used only locally), but they can happen from time to time.

In that case handle the issue with high care, especially if the issue is not publicly announced and fixed by a released maintenance update yet.

If you are not sure about something just ask the other team members or the security team.

Code Review for Security Fixes

Code review for unpublished security issues is a bit more complicated as opening a usual pull request would actually announce the possible attack to public without a fix available for the customers.

Do not use GitHub for discussing security issues or proposing a fix!

How to Discuss or Fix Security Issues

  • Attach the proposed fix (a diff) to bugzilla, mark it as private (just to be sure, the bug should already be hidden for public). After the fix is published commit the fix to GitHub.

  • Use the internal Git instance at https://gitlab.suse.de/, it supports merge requests which work the same way as pull requests at GitHub. After the fix is released just push it to the GitHub remote.

Shared Bug Queries

There are several shared bug queries:

  • yast2-maintainers bugs - All open bugs assigned to the yast2-maintainers account, the newly reported YaST bugs are by default assigned to this account.
  • yast2-maintainers not needinfo bugs - Similar to the previous one, but the bugs in NEEDINFO state are not displayed. This is useful when you want to see bugs which have not been checked yet.
  • yast-internal bugs - Confirmed YaST bugs which are tracked in Trello. The URL attribute of these bugs should point to the relevant Trello card.
  • yast-internal reopen bugs - Similar to the previous one, but with reopen bugs only. Note that reopen bugs keep assigned to yast-internal@suse.de, so they are easily overlooked because they are not listed in yast2-maintainers searches.
  • needinfo from yast - All bugs with needinfo from yast* (e.g., yast-internal, yast2-maintainers, autoyast-maintainers, etc).
  • yast-team-bugs - All open bugs assigned to all YaST team members or to the generic YaST team accounts.

You can add these queries to your default Bugzilla footer so they can be easily used. Go to to the Saved Searches configuration, search for the shared YaST queries above and check the option Show in Footer option. Use the Submit Changes button at the very bottom to save the changes.

Trello Tools

You can use the ytrello tool for creating the Trello cards for bugs automatically. See the README how to set it up and use it.

Alternatively you can install the tampermonkey browser plugin and use this user script.