[Bf-docboard] Interest for testing online manual editing?

[Campbell Barton]

Hi, mailing to see if there is interest to test gitlab for online
manual editing,
since it keeps coming up as a pain-point with the Sphinx.

To be clear, this would be a way for people to submit edits to the
manual without having to download or setup anything.
You can edit online and do a merge-request (like github's pull-requests).

This isn't being proposed as some planned migration to gitlab,
since for larger changes I think you will still want to download, edit
and build the source locally.

While the ability to do online edits is nice, gitlab has some real
limitations for us:

- online editor is basic.
- some sphinx tags aren't supported.
- the preview is limited (no cross references or images for example).

On the other hand this is similar to whats available on github,
where some projects accept documentation edits using Sphinx.

Note, I realize it would be really nice to add edit button in corner
of the online manual that links to merge-request.
However since this a test, I rather not promote this publicly as the
primary way for docs to be edited.


Setup:

The only thing you need to setup is a gitlab account, after that you
can make edits and submit merge-requests (like github's pull
requests).

If you like to browse the manual on gitlab, to get a feel for how this
might work, I pushed a mirror to my account [0].

Since gitlab is open-source, longer term there is the possibility
self-host and make it better fit our needs,
however for this test we will just use gitlab as-is.

So I'm mailing to see if others are interested to try out this for a
limited time (a month should be long enough).

Anyone interested to try this?


[0] https://gitlab.com/ideasman42/blender_manual

----

Technical Details:

These details aren't needed to use the system,
just including for others who are curious.

- the git repository is a mirror of svn made using git-svn.
- merge requests can be accepted via git and pushed svn.
- repository is currently ~110mb.


-- 
- Campbell