[petsc-dev] Tiny pull requests via Bitbucket web interface

[Patrick Sanan]

After Karl's nice talk on contributing to PETSc, I was reminded of a
similar talk that I saw at the Julia conference. The title was also
something like "Contributing is easy!" but used an even more extreme
example of making your first contribution. It was (as Barry encouraged) a
small documentation change, and they demonstrated how to do this via the
GitHub web interface.


This could be a great way to lower the "activation energy" for these kinds
of tiny, trivially-reviewable changes.


The practical steps with Bitbucket are approximately :

   - go to the PETSc Bitbucket site
   - navigate to the source file you want to change
   - "edit"
   - make sure you are at "master" (I had to select this from the
   pull-down, otherwise "edit" was greyed out and and gives a hint on
   mouseover)
   - make your small, innocuous edit
   - "commit"
   - select "create a pull request" if needbe, and fill out comments /
   reviewers as usual.

I believe that if you don't have write access, you can still do this and it
will create a fork for you automatically.


Here's a test:

https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/pull-requests/975/docs-manual-makefile-fix-typo-in-error/diff


Thoughts? Should this be actively encouraged?
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