Structured way to make 'out of band' changes to phylesystem

[jar398]

There should be a straightforward way for someone with sufficient privileges, but no knowledge of the workings of peyotl or phylesystem-api, to make changes to phylesystem via github.

There are many ways to do this. One might be to document the way we do it now, which I'm not sure I understand (even though I just did it). Another would be to add a service that takes a pull request name, merges the PR (if consistent), and updates the state on the phylesystem-api server. Or, a shell script that does something similar. I'm not sure the design details are important; what's important is that the person doing it should not have to be deeply familiar with implementation details.

A bonus would be not having to take the API down for an extended period in order to do the update. Seems to me it should be possible to do the update (given that a API is already prepared) in a single operation and just a few seconds.

I think we should be welcoming this kind of phylesystem change, which leverages git and github so nicely, not attempting to pretend is doesn't or shouldn't happen.