Triaging Minikube Issues

How to triage issues in the minikube repo

Community triage takes place every Wednesday from 11:05AM-11:55PM PT.

All community members are welcome and encouraged to join and help us triage minikube!

Triage is an important part of maintaining the health of the minikube repo. A well organized repo allows maintainers to prioritize feature requests, fix bugs, and respond to users facing difficulty with the tool as quickly as possible.

Triage includes:

  • Labeling issues
  • Responding to issues
  • Closing issues

If you’re interested in helping out with minikube triage, this doc covers the basics of doing so.

Additionally, if you’d be interested in participating in our weekly triage meeting, please fill out this form to express interest. Thank you!

Daily Triage

Daily triage has two goals:

  1. Responsiveness for new issues
  2. Responsiveness when explicitly requested information was provided

The list of outstanding items are at http://tinyurl.com/mk-tparty/daily-triage - it covers:

  1. Issues without a kind/ or triage/ label
  2. Issues without a priority/ label
  3. triage/needs-information issues which the user has followed up on, and now require a response.

Categorization

The most important level of categorizing the issue is defining what type it is. We typically want at least one of the following labels on every issue, and some issues may fall into multiple categories:

  • kind/support - The default for most incoming issues
  • kind/bug - When it’s a bug or we aren’t delivering the best user experience

Other possibilities:

  • kind/feature- Identify new feature requests
  • kind/flake - Used for flaky integration or unit tests
  • kind/cleanup - Cleaning up/refactoring the codebase
  • kind/documentation - Updates or additions to minikube documentation
  • kind/ux - Issues that involve improving user experience
  • kind/security - When there’s a security vulnerability in minikube

If the issue is specific to an operating system, hypervisor, container, addon, or Kubernetes component:

os/[operating system] - When the issue appears specific to an operating system

  • os/linux
  • os/macos
  • os/windows

co/[driver] - When the issue appears specific to a driver

  • co/hyperkit
  • co/hyperv
  • co/kvm2
  • co/none-driver
  • co/docker-driver
  • co/podman-driver
  • co/virtualbox

co/[kubernetes component] - When the issue appears specific to a k8s component

  • co/apiserver
  • co/etcd
  • co/coredns
  • co/dashboard
  • co/kube-proxy
  • co/kubeadm
  • co/kubelet
  • co/kubeconfig

Other useful tags:

Did an Event occur that we can dedup similar issues against?

  • ev/CrashLoopBackoff
  • ev/Panic
  • ev/Pending
  • ev/kubeadm-exit-1

Suspected Root cause:

  • cause/vm-environment
  • cause/invalid-kubelet-options

Help wanted?

Good First Issue - bug has a proposed solution, can be implemented w/o further discussion.

Help wanted - if the bug could use help from a contributor

Prioritization

If the issue is not kind/support, it needs a priority label:

priority/critical-urgent - someones top priority ASAP, such as security issue, user-visible bug, or build breakage. Rarely used.

priority/important-soon: in time for the next two releases (8 weeks)

priority/important-longterm: 2-4 releases from now

priority/backlog: agreed that this would be good to have, but no one is available at the moment. Consider tagging as help wanted

priority/awaiting-more-evidence: may be more useful, but there is not yet enough support.

Weekly Triage

Weekly triage has three goals:

  1. Catching up on unresponded issues
  2. Reviewing and closing PR’s
  3. Closing stale issues

The list of outstanding items can be found at http://tinyurl.com/mk-tparty/weekly-triage.

Post-Release Triage

Post-release triage occurs after a major release (around every 4-6 weeks). It focuses on:

  1. Closing bugs that have been resolved by the release
  2. Reprioritizing bugs that have not been resolved by the release
  3. Letting users know if we believe that there is still an issue

This includes reviewing:

  1. Every issue that hasn’t been touched in the last 2 days
  2. Re-evaluation of long-term issues
  3. Re-evaluation of short-term issues

Responding to Issues

Needs More Information

A sample response to ask for more info:

I don’t yet have a clear way to replicate this issue. Do you mind adding some additional details. Here is additional information that would be helpful:

* The exact minikube start command line used

* The full output of the minikube start command, preferably with --alsologtostderr -v=4 for extra logging.

* The full output of minikube logs

* The full output of kubectl get po -A

Thank you for sharing your experience!

Then: Label with triage/needs-information.

Issue might be resolved

If you think a release may have resolved an issue, ask the author to see if their issue has been resolved:

Could you please check to see if minikube addresses this issue? We’ve made some changes with how this is handled, and improved the minikube logs output to help us debug tricky cases like this.

Then: Label with triage/needs-information.

Closing with Care

Issues typically need to be closed for the following reasons:

  • The issue has been addressed
  • The issue is a duplicate of an existing issue
  • There has been a lack of information over a long period of time

In any of these situations, we aim to be kind when closing the issue, and offer the author action items should they need to reopen their issue or still require a solution.

Samples responses for these situations include:

Issue has been addressed

@author: I believe this issue is now addressed by minikube v1.4, as it . If you still see this issue with minikube v1.4 or higher, please reopen this issue by commenting with /reopen

Thank you for reporting this issue!

Then: Close the issue

Duplicate Issue

This issue appears to be a duplicate of #X, do you mind if we move the conversation there?

This way we can centralize the content relating to the issue. If you feel that this issue is not in fact a duplicate, please re-open it using /reopen. If you have additional information to share, please add it to the new issue.

Thank you for reporting this!

Then: Label with triage/duplicate and close the issue.

Lack of Information

If an issue hasn’t been active for more than four weeks, and the author has been pinged at least once, then the issue can be closed.

Hi @author – is this issue still occurring? Are additional details available? If so, please feel free to re-open the issue by commenting with /reopen. This issue will be closed as additional information was unavailable and some time has passed.

Additional information that may be helpful:

* Whether the issue occurs with the latest minikube release

* The exact minikube start command line used

* Attach the full output of minikube logs, run minikube logs --file=logs.txt to create a log file

Thank you for sharing your experience!

Then: Close the issue.


Last modified March 22, 2023: site: update triage hours (092a421a0)