Synthesis Collective - Mutagen-Modding/Synthesis GitHub Wiki

Table Of Contents

The Synthesis Collective

This is a side organization related to Synthesis, which houses patchers written and maintained by the community.

Its main goal is to relieve patcher developers from maintenance work. The community driven team can help maintain/approve small fixes to the collection, without needing to funnel every action through a single person. Each patcher retains the original authors as explicit collaborators who have full read/write access. Additionally, a small team also has access to all repos within the collective, which allows them to also make/approve fixes/tweaks to any given patcher.

The organization may evolve over time, but these general ideals will remain steady.

Ownership

Be aware that a patcher added to the Collective is then under full ownership of the Collective, which follows a Cathedral ideal. An original author cannot forcefully request a patcher be removed from the Collective and transferred back to them, or deleted. They of course are able to fork the patcher and deviate from there as they wish.

The original author remains the main head of any given patcher as long as they wish. The goal of the collective is to provide maintenance and bugfix support rather than take over and reimagine any given patcher. Small features might be added by popular community demand if the original author is absent.

An author may be blocked access to the patcher they added in the case of intentional sabotage (wiping commits, etc).

Is the Collective a good fit for you and your patcher?

  • Is maintenance/small fixes not of interest to you?
  • Have you moved on to other projects?
  • Is an iron grip on your code not too important to you?
  • Do you care about Cathedral ideals, and want your patcher to outlive you and your modding days?

Then the Collective might be a good option to consider.

Do you have to put patchers in the Collective to contribute?

No! You can contribute to the patchers within the Collective and improve them, while also having your own personal patchers under your own github name. Moving any patchers to the Collective is a 100% separate and voluntary action.

How to become part of the Collective

  • Request membership to the Collective. This will give you no real power, by default.
  • Transfer your repository to the Collective. (Main Github Repo Page -> Settings -> Options -> Scroll down -> Transfer Ownership to Synthesis-Collective)
  • You will automatically be added as a collaborator (full read/write access) to the transferred repository
  • You can fork your own copy if you wish, or just work directly on the main repo that now lives within the Collective.
  • If you do not fork, all links to your previous repo's location will automatically redirect to the collective's copy.

Style and Formatting

Everyone codes differently, especially in an environment like this where everyone is from different coding backgrounds. This is okay for new and exploratory code.

However, patchers within the collective should gravitate towards C# Visual Studio formatting rules. If you're adjusting code that already exists, it should not move -farther- away from C# styling. As such, over time, most patchers within the collective should stabilize into VS formatted code and C# naming conventions.

None of this is a strict rule, but just a general guideline that should be considered when making a PR to contribute to a Collective patcher. PRs that aggressively deviate existing code away from typical C# formatting can be asked to reverse those changes before the PR will be accepted.

More questions? Swing by the Discord and chat!