Re: Direct links to edit documentation

(accidentally sent my last post without the links at the bottom, fixed)

Daniel and Magnus, thanks for your replies. Here's my personal 2-click
submission "ideal scenario", that may differ from other contributors, but
seems to be very common now for many FOSS projects. I think this will work
for the vast majority of the documentation pages. Note that this is not a
wiki-style editing, but a proper pull request process subject to
maintainer's review.

* While viewing the "CREATE TABLE" page [1], I click some "edit" button
(e.g. in the upper right corner)
* It takes me to the GitHub "edit" page [2] (this is the link target of the
gray pencil icon on page [3] - upper right corner on gray background)
* I edit the page -- the syntax seems trivial enough for the vast majority
of non-structural edits. I can add more examples, improve grammar, add
links, etc.
* I click "Propose file changes" at the bottom. This automatically will
create a fork of the repo, and create a pull request into the main Postgres
github repo.
* (automated step) some bot creates a PR against the primary Postgres
repo, submitting the change.
* Maintainers review and merge the change.

Now, I do see that https://github.com/postgres/postgres is not the primary
repo, and that currently PRs to it do not go to the maintainers, but I
think it would greatly simplify the path of user contributions if GitHub
PRs were auto-submitted using the proper Postgres process (i.e. with a
bot?). Just compare the above 2 clicks process to submit a documentation
change with the giant instruction page at
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch -- clearly it is a big
deterrent for small improvements.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtable.html
[2]
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/edit/master/doc/src/sgml/ref/create_table.sgml
[3]
https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/doc/src/sgml/ref/create_table.sgml

On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 3:23 PM Daniel Gustafsson <daniel(at)yesql(dot)se> wrote:

> > On 4 May 2020, at 19:06, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
>
> > Question is if the benefit would outweigh the cost, compared to just
> receiving
> > comments and "manually patching them in".
>
> Another question is the cost of managing access to such a system, we
> haven't
> exactly had the best of luck with input from interactive systems in the
> past.
> Is a community login enough or does it need an extra bit like the Wiki?
> Just
> thinking out loud of the costs involved which need to be offset.
>
> cheers ./daniel