Minor release update contributions should be easier

[mi-hol]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Many potential contributors are looking for a simple way to add or update version & EOL for an existing product.
My example is Java 8u302.
contributing.md doesn't mention this "simple" use case yet.
Forking of repo and modification of a markdown page is creating a hurdle, that turns out to be too high for many potential contributors

Describe the solution you'd like
a database and web page for these simple manual updates would be a great solution

Describe alternatives you've considered
a data import via spreadsheet, but error handling creates too much of a hassle for potential contributors

Additional context

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[captn3m0]

Thanks, this is something I've also wanted to improve. Perhaps having a guide with screenshots of a sample edit would help? Something that highlights all the clicks and possible edits?

A database approach is something I'm not very keen on. Having the source on GitHub easily makes it very easy to hack on. There are short-comings of the YAML approach for sure (including ease of contribution), but it hasn't held us back much while giving us a good structure.

Aside: For patch/minor updates to the latest release - there is a WIP effort (#322) to automatically update the same. It doesn't apply to Java sadly, because OpenJDK maintains release information across multiple git repositories. So long-term, these minor PRs for updating latest releases shouldn't be needed for most products.

[mi-hol]

Aside: For patch/minor updates to the latest release - there is a WIP effort (#322) to automatically update the same.

Great to see this approach for open source software being worked on, but how would that apply to closed source software?

[captn3m0]

It depends - if the release information is available somewhere, we can always scrape it.

This attempt targets git/github sources, but as an example - we already scrape GKE version information using Google Cloud APIs (#314).

Planning to use this for Java for eg.

[captn3m0]

With our automation, minor update contributions are rarely needed now for most of the products. Going to close this.