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

[Smith, Barry F.]

> On Jun 6, 2018, at 10:06 AM, Karl Rupp <rupp at iue.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> yes, I support Patrick's idea of actively encouraging such simple pull requests. Particularly when it comes to documentation, it would be very handy to also add a link to the manual pages on the top right. For example,
> http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-current/docs/manualpages/Mat/MatSetValue.html
> currently states "Report Typos and Errors". We could add another line, e.g. "Fix Typos and Errors via Bitbucket" pointing to the respective source file (maybe even the source line can be pointed to).

    Why isn't this in an on-line pull request?


> 
> Best regards,
> Karli
> 
> 
> 
> On 06/05/2018 07:02 PM, Patrick Sanan wrote:
>> 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?