Where should mod forks be posted?

[Noriel_Sylvire]

I have forked multidimensions by AITechEye and fixed a couple bugs and added cave generation among other stuff.
Where should I post about this? On the original author's post as a reply? Or as a new and separate post.

Also, I am really new to publishing the software I make. Up until very recently, all my code was just for myself or friends, and this is the first time I ever fork any project. Have I been disrespectful by forking and modifying it without notifying the author? Have I broken some rule that I didn't know of?
I saw he didn't make any new commit for two and a half years, so I thought he abandoned the project.

I am really concerned about disrespecting the original author, as I liked this mod a lot, so much I read the entire code, and added all of this in one and a half days, even while multitasking other stuff because I couldn't stop myself from thinking of this mod.

[rubenwardy]

It's a good idea to contribute bug fixes and features to the original mod, it reduces the amount of work needed to maintain mods, by merging changes upstream. Someone not committing for 2 years doesn't necessarily mean the mod is dead, worth getting in contact anyway.

However, forks are cool too. If this is a fork you're planning on keeping around, you should make your own topic and submit it to ContentDB yourself. You can also post a reply in the original topic to point people towards it

Forking is a natural and good part of open source. Just make sure you give credit and follow the license

[Noriel_Sylvire]

It's a good idea to contribute bug fixes and features to the original mod, it reduces the amount of work needed to maintain mods, by merging changes upstream. Someone not committing for 2 years doesn't necessarily mean the mod is dead, worth getting in contact anyway.

However, forks are cool too. If this is a fork you're planning on keeping around, you should make your own topic and submit it to ContentDB yourself. You can also post a reply in the original topic to point people towards it

Forking is a natural and good part of open source. Just make sure you give credit and follow the license

I'm sorry for assuming the project was abandoned, this is really my first experience with the open source community.

I have one more question: One of my commits is an edit on the README.md that says this is not the main branch of the mod, but a fork. If I were to submit a pull request (that's what you call requesting the changes to be made part of the main branch, right?), can I make it so that specific change doesn't get pulled?

(I'm sorry if I didn't use the correct terms, I still don't exactly know what they mean)

[Blockhead]

First, if you used a git branch rather than committing to the default branch this should be easy. Make a different branch that doesn't change the README but adds all your other changes. As an alternative, you can make a pull request on GitHub which "Allows edits from maintainers" and then they can undo the changes to the README, but it's usually best to make things mergeable without changes (or at least without reversions). I noticed you made a pullrequest branch so that seems to work just fine.

Forked repositories on GitHub differ in their intent. Some are to actually fork the project and go off in a different direction, but most are just mirrors of the original project with maybe a few branches with changes on top, for making pull requests. If someone has put their code under a free software license they should expect forks. Sometimes people don't think things through and get surprised when someone forks their stuff, but most people aren't so defensive of their stuff, not in the Minetest space at least.

Normal procedure for contributing back to the mainstream of a project is to fork and make a pull request, but commenting on the mod's forum thread, ContentDB and sometimes directly contacting the author can all be helpful to get their attention in case it seems they're not that active. Someone like Tenplus1 is going to get back to you pretty quickly. Making a Pull Request usually sends an email so if someone's not too busy, hasn't disabled the emails, and checks their email regularly, they should get back to you quickly enough.

If you're declaring a change-of-direction kind of fork you can post your own forum thread and announce it in the original thread. This is a bit closer to stepping on someone's toes though since in many cases it's "I don't like the direction of the mod, I'm forking". But if it's free software they can't stop you. A lot of these kinds of forks are maintained by a server (like the Forks in LinuxForks) or individual, and often try to merge features from upstream, but it adds complexity when the code has diverged.

Sometimes an author makes an official declaration of a new maintainer for their project. Sometimes at that time a suffix is added to the project's name to differentiate the new maintainership or the change of an era. Forks also often have prefix/suffixes. In the longer cases of the absence of an author the only real way forward is to kind of take over the project, though of course that causes a bit of friction. ContentDB also has rules about mod name ownership but I'm not the expert on that.

[Noriel_Sylvire]

Thank you for your directing me!! All of this info was super helpful! 🙂