GitHub Issue Priorities

P0: Outage

Expectation: Drop everything else and work continuously to resolve. An outage means that some piece of infrastructure that the community relies on is down. A P0 issue is more urgent than simply blocking the next release.

Example P0 issues:

• the build is broken, halting all development
• the website is down
• a vulnerability requires a point release ASAP

P1: Critical

Expectation: Continuous status updates. P1 bugs should not be unassigned. Most P1 bugs should block release.

Example P1 issues:

• data loss error
• important component is nonfunctional for important use cases
• major performance regression
• security related issues (CVEs)
• failing postcommit test
• flaky test

P2: Default

Expectation: Most tickets fall into this priority. These can be planned and executed by anyone who is interested. No special urgency is associated, but if no action is taken on a P2 ticket for a long time, it indicates it is actually just P3/nice-to-have.

Example P2 issues

• typical feature request
• bug that affects some use cases but don’t make a component nonfunctional
• ignored (“sickbayed”) test

P3: Nice-to-have

Expectation: Nice-to-have improvements.

Example P3 issues

• feature request that is nice-to-have
• ticket filed as P2 that no one finds time to work on

P4

Expectation: Nice-to-have improvements that are also very small and easy. Usually it is quicker to just fix them than to file a bug, but the issue can be referenced by a pull request and shows up in release notes.

Example P4 issues

• spelling errors in comments or code