Consider moving manual/docs to a separate repo

[bartlomieju]

https://deno.land/manual is the "source for truth" and main documentation for Deno.

These docs are generated from files in docs/ directory.

I don't have a data to back it up, but it is my impression that going through full Deno CI is discouraging contributions to manual; after all there are several pages on how to contribute to the repo and setting up dev environment is non-trivial. Additionally CI can take anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes.

Hereby I propose to move docs/ directory to a separate repository (deno_manual) with its own CI.

Here are pros and cons for this proposal.

Pros:

• contributing will be significantly easier as the only requirement would be to have deno installed on your system (to run deno fmt)
• CI will take less than 1 minute (quick development loop)
• we could even enable auto-formatting in CI, so the PRs that are opened via "Edit" button in Github wouldn't fails more often than not

Cons:

• another repo to maintain (would need to tag and release in unison with Deno release); although the maintenance cost should be marginal

All in all, I believe moving documentation to a separate repo will have a positive effect on the state of the manual as it would be trivial to contribute to it, which hasn't been the case lately in main repo.

Kinda off-topic but #11170 would immensely help to keep manual up to date by type-checking examples in codeblock (we already have this functionality for JSDocs, the issue is about adding ability to typecheck codeblock in markdown files).

[jsejcksn]

I don't have a data to back it up, but it is my impression that going through full Deno CI is discouraging contributions to manual; after all there are several pages on how to contribute to the repo and setting up dev environment is non-trivial...

This was my experience when first contributing to Deno. When I first found the project, I wanted to pick issues that were solely focused on the std library because it had nothing to do with Rust — however, much of the contribution steps/tasks had nothing to do with isolated TypeScript modules, and it was very confusing coming in fresh.

[bartlomieju]

I don't have a data to back it up, but it is my impression that going through full Deno CI is discouraging contributions to manual; after all there are several pages on how to contribute to the repo and setting up dev environment is non-trivial...

This was my experience when first contributing to Deno. When I first found the project, I wanted to pick issues that were solely focused on the std library because it had nothing to do with Rust — however, much of the contribution steps/tasks had nothing to do with isolated TypeScript modules, and it was very confusing coming in fresh.

Thanks for the feedback Jesse, this is very useful opinion.