Carter Schonwald
In writing the following huge wall of text, I had and idea that I think many folks would find palatable:
What if simple small patches (such as hypothetical drive by doc patches ) had a mailing list where folks could email the simple / small patches as email attachments plus a body text that summarizes the patch, what it does, and why it's simple!
I completely agree that for small (e.g. documentation) patches our current system is quite heavy. For this reason I suggested at ICFP that we simply begin accepting small patches via GitHub pull requests. Frankly, this is less work for me than merging patches from a mailing list and I believe many users feel that GitHub is more accessible than a mailing list. The problem of course is what subset of patches do we want to allow to be taken via GitHub. My suggested answer to that is any patch which, if I were to write it myself, I would feel comfortable pushing directly to the tree. Then there is the question of what do we do with pull requests opened which do not satisfy this criterion. In this case I would likely open a Phabricator Differential with the pull request and close the pull request with a link to the Diff. In the ideal case this will inspire the contributor to join the review process on Phabricator; in the worst case review turns up issues in the patch and the user gives up. Either way, at least the contributor feels his patch has been seen and given the attention it deserves. Cheers, - Ben