profanity/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Profanity

Build

Please follow the build section in our user guide. You might also take a look at the Dockerfile.* in the root directory.

Submitting patches

We recommend for people to always work on a dedicated git branch for each fix or feature. Don't work on master. So that they can easily pull master and rebase their work if needed.

For fixing (reported) bugs we usually use git switch -c fix/issuenumber-somedescription. When working on a new feature we usually use git switch -c feature/optionalissuenumber-somedescription.

However this is not a rule just a recommendation to keep an overview of things. If your change isn't a bugfix or new feature you can also just use any branch name.

Commit messages

Write commit messages that make sense. Explain what and why you change. Write in present tense. Please give this guideline a read.

GitHub

We would like to encourage people to use GitHub to create pull requests. It makes it easy for us to review the patches, track WIP branches, organize branches with labels and milestones, and help others to see what's being worked on.

Also see the blogpost Contributing a Patch via GitHub.

E-Mail

In case GitHub is down or you can't use it for any other reason, you can send a patch to our mailing list.

We recommend that you follow the workflow mentioned above. And create your patch using the git-format-patch tool: git format-patch master --stdout > feature.patch

Another git service

We prefer if you create a pull request on GitHub. Then our team can easily request reviews. And we have the history of the review saved in one place.

If using GitHub is out of the question but you are okay using another service (i.e.: GitLab, codeberg) then please message us in the MUC or send us an email. We will then pull from your repository and merge manually.

Rules

• When fixing a bug, describe it and how your patch fixes it.
• When fixing a reported issue add an Fixes https://github.com/profanity-im/profanity/issues/23 in the commit body.
• When adding a new feature add a description of the feature and how it should be used (workflow).
• If your patch adds a new configuration option add this to the profrc.example file.
• If your patch adds a new theming option add this to the theme_template file.
• Each patch or pull request should only contain related modifications.
• Run the tests and code formatters before submitting (c.f. Chapter 'Check everything' of this README).
• When changing the UI it would be appreciated if you could add a before and after screenshot for comparison.
• Squash fixup commits into one
• If applicable, document how to test the functionality

Hints and Pitfalls

• When adding a new hotkey/shortcut make sure it's not registered in Profanity already. And also that it's not a default shortcut of readline.
• We ship a .git-blame-ignore-revs file containing banal commits which you will most likely want to ignore when using git blame. In case you are using vim and fugitive command Gblame Git blame --ignore-revs-file=.git-blame-ignore-revs might be helpful in your vimrc. You can also set the blame.ignoreRevsFile option in your git config to have git blame generally ignore the listed commits.

Coding style

Follow the style already present ;-)

To make this easier for you we created a .clang-format file. You'll need to have clang-format installed.

Then just run make format before you do any commit.

It might be a good idea to add a git pre-commit hook. So git automatically runs clang-format before doing a commit.

You can add the following snippet to .git/hooks/pre-commit:

for f in $(git diff --cached --name-only)
do
    if [[ "$f" =~ \.(c|h)$ ]]; then
        clang-format -i $f
    fi
done

If you feel embarrassed every time the CI fails you can add the following snippet to .git/hooks/pre-push:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
./ci-build.sh

This will run the same tests that the CI runs and refuse the push if it fails. The CI script runs 4 parallel builds with different configurations:

• Full — all features enabled (+ coverage in --coverage-only mode)
• Minimal — all optional features disabled
• NoEncrypt — no encryption (OTR, PGP, OMEMO disabled)
• Default — default ./configure options

Each build runs Valgrind and functional tests on Linux. Use ./ci-build.sh --coverage-only to run only the Full build with coverage collection.

Output shows test results per build:

✓ Full PASSED
  Unit tests:       437 passed, 0 failed
  Functional tests: 69 passed, 0 failed
  Coverage:         Lines: 27.5% | Functions: 36.2% | Branches: 18.1%
  Duration:         5m39s

Note that it will run on the actual content of the repository directory and not what may have been staged/committed.

If you're in a hurry you can add the --no-verify flag when issuing git push and the pre-push hook will be skipped.

Note: We provide a config file that describes our coding style for clang. But due to a mistake on their side it might happen that you can get a different result that what we expect. See here and here for details. We will try to always run latest clang-format.

Finding mistakes

Test your changes with the following tools to find mistakes.

unit tests

Run make check to run the unit tests with your current configuration or ./ci-build.sh to check with different switches passed to configure.

flat-file backend tests

To run functional tests with the flat-file database backend (instead of SQLite):

make check-functional-flatfile

Or manually for a single group:

PROF_FLATFILE=1 PROF_TEST_GROUP=1 ./tests/functionaltests/functionaltests 1

valgrind

We provide a suppressions file prof.supp. It is a combination of the suppressions for shipped with glib2, python and custom rules.

G_DEBUG=gc-friendly G_SLICE=always-malloc valgrind --tool=memcheck --track-origins=yes --leak-check=full --leak-resolution=high --num-callers=30 --show-leak-kinds=definite --log-file=profval --suppressions=prof.supp ./profanity

There's also the option to create a "personalized" suppression file with the up-to-date glib2 and python suppressions.

make my-prof.supp

After executing this, you can replace the --suppressions=prof.supp argument in the above call, by --suppressions=my-prof.supp.

clang

Running the clang static code analyzer helps improving the quality too.

make clean
scan-build make
scan-view ...

Security checks

We have a static analyzer check-cwe134.sh that detects CWE-134 format string vulnerabilities. It runs automatically in CI but you can also run it locally:

./check-cwe134.sh

This checks for unsafe patterns where data could be passed directly as a format string to functions like printf, cons_show, etc. Never pass a raw string for formatting; use "%s" format specifier instead.

Finding typos

We include a .codespellrc configuration file for codespell in the root directory. Before committing it might make sense to run codespell to see if you made any typos.

You can run the make spell command for this.

Check everything

make doublecheck will run the code formatter, spell checker and unit tests.

Functional tests

The functional test suite uses stabber as a mock XMPP server. Tests are located in tests/functionaltests/.

Running functional tests

Functional tests require stabber to be installed. Once installed, tests run as part of make check:

make check                      # Run all tests (unit + functional)
make check-functional-parallel  # Run functional tests in parallel (~3x faster)
./tests/functionaltests/functionaltests    # Run all functional tests sequentially
./tests/functionaltests/functionaltests 1  # Run specific group (1-4)

Test groups

Tests are organized into 4 groups for parallel execution:

Group	Description
1	Connect, Ping, Rooms, Software
2	Message, Receipts, Roster, Chat Session
3	Presence, Disconnect
4	MUC, Carbons

To add a new group:

1. Define the test array in functionaltests.c
2. Add entry to groups[] array
3. Update FUNC_TEST_GROUPS in Makefile.am

Writing functional tests

Use content-based stubbing with stabber:

// Use stbbr_for_query for IQ queries (roster, disco, etc.)
stbbr_for_query("jabber:iq:roster", "<iq type='result'>...</iq>");

// Use stbbr_send for presence, message, and push-style stanzas
stbbr_send("<presence from='buddy@localhost'>...</presence>");

Guidelines:

1. Use stbbr_for_query(namespace, xml) for IQ queries where the namespace is stable.
2. Use stbbr_send(xml) for presence, message, and other push-style stanzas.
3. Keep assertions tolerant of ordering when possible; use prof_output_regex() for flexible matching.
4. If timing issues appear, use prof_timeout() around critical expectations and reset afterwards.
5. When adding new tests, place them in the appropriate group based on functionality.