Profanity: XMPP Client Documentation

Introduction to the Community

For my first open-source contribution, I chose to work with the Profanity project, which is a lightweight, terminal-based XMPP client written in C. I chose Profanity because I found the project approachable. I initially struggled with picking a project. As many of them seemed very overwhelmed with the code bases. I decided to do documentation because I had a lot of trouble looking for a project to contribute to; I was too intimidated by the code most of the time. I realized that most of the projects I could just try to understand and document the code, which will make it easier for myself and others to try and contribute to projects.

Why I Picked It

The reason I picked Profanity is because I am super interested in XMPP as a protocol; it seems so awesome and secure. I wanted to work on a project that I would use, so I set up an XMPP account so I can use it with this client. I saw that the program was written in C, which is a language I am comfortable in.

Onboarding Resources

Some of the resources that I found are the following:

• HelpedREADME.md me set up the project and understand its purpose.
• ProvidedCONTRIBUTING.md instructions on how to submit issues and pull requests. These resources made it easier for me to understand how to best contribute.

The Issue

I decided to take on the task of improving documentation of the Profanity codebase, starting with the files in src\ and src\xmpp.

Process

1. I forked the repository and built the project locally to ensure I could test any changes I made.
2. I read through the code src\ and wrote structured comments for each function.
3. I used Git to commit my changes and created a pull request on GitHub.
4. I created a pull request.

Challenges

The main challenge I faced was fully understanding what each function was doing; I used generative AI to help me. I ended up having over 1000+ lines of comments. I also added a README in src\ that contains an overview of the files and functions