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As a young software developer eager to make my contribution to FOSS (and KDE especially), I find it extremely difficult contribute to complex projects (like KWin), because aside from a few language/framework-specific norms, every project has its own convoluted project structure. Even if I generally know what I want to do, most of the time, I have to read most of the codebase to figure out which parts are relevant for the change I want to make. Even in enterprise-level projects I did work on, I wasn't required to know what every line of code does.

I'd like to propose a documentation framework like Doxygen, JavaDoc etc., which is language-agnostic, basically just documenting what each file is about, and how the project structure is laid out. I imagine this could be done with a dotfile in each directory, which describes the files and folders contained in it, so that each developer can focus on their own part of the code. Alternatively, it could be done in a central location for those who don't like clutter. This info would then be compiled to a web page like other doc. frameworks, but I could see how IDE integration would make this really useful.VidMate Mobdro

You are welcome to contribute to exactly this. Did you get in touch with the developers about it?

albertohunter wrote:As a young software developer eager to make my contribution to FOSS (and KDE especially), I find it extremely difficult contribute to complex projects (like KWin), because aside from a few language/framework-specific norms, every project has its own convoluted project structure. Even if I generally know what I want to do, most of the time, I have to read most of the codebase to figure out which parts are relevant for the change I want to make. Even in enterprise-level projects I did work on, I wasn't required to know what every line of code does.

I'd like to propose a documentation framework like Doxygen, JavaDoc etc., which is language-agnostic, basically just documenting what each file is about, and how the project structure is laid out. I imagine this could be done with a dotfile in each directory, which describes the files and folders contained in it, so that each developer can focus on their own part of the code. Alternatively, it could be done in a central location for those who don't like clutter. This info would then be compiled to a web page like other doc. frameworks, but I could see how IDE integration would make this really useful.

So for context we had until recently api documentation for application, but it broke when the server running it went down. There is a plan to replace our system for generating our documentation because currently it can't scale to cover all applications and already take a lot of time to generate the documentation for only the frameworks. I also started recently https://develop.kde.org/docs/ that contains some helpful information to understand some of the inner working of the applications.

Some applications have a great api internal documentation (KDevelop, Krita), but others could need some help. This could be a great first contributions I can guide you if you want.