Re: [Qemu-devel] Improving patch tracking - something like gerrit?

[Markus Armbruster]

"Daniel P. Berrange" <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, Feb 03, 2014 at 12:45:31PM +0000, Mark Cave-Ayland wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> It should be fairly evident to most people that the volume of
>> patches flowing through the qemu-devel mailing list is continually
>> increasing, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to track which
>> patches have been applied over time. This is particularly a problem
>> where patchsets have dependencies on other patchsets which haven't
>> yet been applied to git master, which can then cause merge conflicts
>> due to length of time taken for the final series to be merged.
>> 
>> Is it time for QEMU to start looking at tools such as gerrit to help
>> manage this process? There seems to be an increasing number of ping
>> requests for outstanding patches (including my own) which don't get
>> applied for weeks, and often even months because they target less
>> popular platforms/subsystems and so don't always get the attention
>> of the committers.
>
> Having had to use Gerrit for a long time on OpenStack, I'd never
> willingly use it on a project I was in charge of for a number
> of reasons
>
>  - No practical integration with email based workflows for people
>    who don't want to use web UIs to comment. You can download patches
>    from tool using to view the code outside the UI, but to actually
>    comment you need to use the RSI-inducing, pointy-clicky web UI.

"It's dead, Jim."

>  - Poor handling of patch series - it shows dependancies between

If the dead could get any deader, this one would now be.

>    patches but that is basically all it does, and even that has
>    poor UI. People frequently review 1 single patch never noticing
>    that its part of a patch series. There's no way to get a view of
>    all patches in a series ordered correctly. If you tag them with
>    a topic, you can view all patches in the topic, but it randomly
>    re-orders the patches, making it basically useless.
>
>  - Poor UI for browsing through historical comments on previous
>    versions of the patch. The comments are split between multiple
>    web page views so you again have pointy-clicky hell trying to
>    read through historical comments.

And deader again.

>  - Poor UI for browsing/querying pending patches. Reviewers typically
>    find themselves having to write external/command line tools to
>    query gerrit in order to workaround its limited UI.

*Boggle*

> So sure, gerrit can track every single patch submitted and tell you
> if it is applied or not, but having used it, I can't say that it is
> a net win overall, particularly if your development process is heavily
> using large patch series.

I think this system would reduce the time I spend on reviewing patches
sharply.  Sounds like a huge win to me!