📋 Onboarding Guide

Internal checklist and commentary for contributors joining the Rotkeeper project. Includes environment and process notes.

📋 Onboarding Guide

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🧟 Rotkeeper Maintainer Onboarding

Welcome, unlucky soul. You’ve just inherited Rotkeeper — a Bash-based static documentation embalmer. It’s not a site generator. It’s a system of modular rituals (rc-*.sh) that:

  • Expand structured YAML tombs
  • Render Markdown and HTML via Oliver
  • Scan for rot
  • Pack results into .tar.gz tombkits

The system is offline-first, manually operated, and intended for long-term preservation. Every action is logged into bones/, every file treated as a death-object.

Its tone? Somewhere between a DevOps toolkit and a cursed scroll from an archivist cult. Expect grit, inconsistency, and occasional brilliance.

📜 How to Review Rotkeeper

If you're joining this system mid-rot, use the following protocol when auditing or peer reviewing the project.

ROTKEEPER REVIEW PROTOCOL

Read as if you are taking over as the new maintainer.

Your Task:

  • 🧠 Ask clarifying questions about what’s missing or unexplained
  • ⚠️ Flag scripts that feel fragile, ambiguous, or overly complex
  • 🛠 Suggest ways to modularize, test, harden, or improve naming
  • ✨ Note anything that feels elegant, purposeful, or surprisingly solid

If you spot TODOs, unfinished rituals, or hallucinated AI logic, call it out. If you love a pattern, highlight it.

💀 Useful Files

  • rotkeeper-manual.md — Generated retrieval documentation for the living grimoire.
  • bones/ — Where logs, configs, and scan results are entombed.
  • home/ — Where your tombs and rendered results live.
  • bones/config/rotkeeper.yaml — Defines the active layout and path configuration.

🧩 Suggested Structure for Your Review

If contributing a formal review, structure it like this:

  1. 🧐 Clarifying Questions — About config, layout, script behavior
  2. 🚩 Fragile / Complex Areas — Any dangerous patterns, bad assumptions, or cursed logic
  3. 💡 Suggestions — Modularization, testing, validation, documentation
  4. ✨ Highlights — Anything elegant, poetic, or unusually clean

Bonus if your review concludes with “summary & next steps.” Bonus-er if it invokes the word "crypt."

🤘 Style Notes

Rotkeeper invites a certain tone:

  • Dry, sarcastic, slightly haunted is encouraged.
  • Feel free to swear at the shell scripts — they deserve it.
  • Use the term "necromantic devops" at least once for luck.

CUNTIER™ reviews (Content Upgrades: Notably Thicker, Intensely Emphatic & Rot-bloated) are welcome.

Welcome to the bonepile.