How might we make code collaboration easier for Community Guides?

[gonzalo-bulnes]

Opening this topic as a discussion, to see if we can come up with reasonable and practical ways to make collaboration around code more effective for Community Guides.

By reasonable I mean: that don’t break current practices around user privacy, e-mail access, etc.

By practical I mean: that don’t increase significantly the maintenance burden for folks doing the maintenance. (Assuming that it is obvious that what is significant is for them to decide.)

As a starting point, from a recent conversation:

@whoami

I am just working on the code and I have to say it is not that straight forward to commonly working on such a code without versioning, diff and merge capabilities. It would be nice to see some very basic versioning and compare capabilities within the thread code viewer.

Or is there a way - an addon - to have a synced code view with a git repository? This would allow us a better collaboration and maintenance of the code itself.

[gonzalo-bulnes]

A quick review of popular Discourse add-ons lead me to:

Discourse Code Review

As far as I can tell after skimming through the topic:

• the owner of the repository that contains the code must configure an access token in GitHub
• and a maintainer of the forum would have to configure the add-on with that access token

That seems beyond the practical line to me, but the add-in also likely does more than was on @whoami’s wish list.

[gonzalo-bulnes]

Embedding a GitHub gist instead of writing the code in a post may cover some ground:

Add Times clicked, and GitHub Gists

[deeplow]

I think the discourse developers use this. They don’t actually use git for anything but code storage, I think. But in our case it may be overkill. I’d be more inclined to just using gists and comments there on github or here.