(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.
> On 4 May 2020, at 19:06, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.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