Re: Rietveld workflow problems

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

Am Wednesday, 21. September 2011, 10:52:37 schrieb David Kastrup:
> Perhaps it would be nice if we found a way to play with "Gerrit",
> supposedly a git-based system similar to Rietveld.

I looked at gerrit a while ago. If you want to take a look at it: 
http://server.kainhofer.com:8088/

Here is a quick summary:

-) Each review is basically one commit in a branch on the gerrit server.

-) To submit a review, you have to use git and push to a particular ref on the 
server:
   git push gerrit HEAD:refs/for/master/
e.g. 
   git push gerrit 1477-suppress-expected-warnings:refs/for/master

So, everyone submitting a patch needs to know how to work with git and remote 
refs etc.

-) To be able to handle updates to patches, it needs a dirty hack: Each commit 
needs to include a unique ID (the commit hash will change if you amend a patch 
or otherwise change it!). There are post-commit hooks for git to insert such 
unique IDs, but still it pollutes the commit message.

See http://gerrit-documentation.googlecode.com/svn/Documentation/2.1.7/user-
upload.html

-) You can only review individual patches. It's not possible to merge multiple 
git commits into one code review. It is, however, possible to review multiple 
patches in one branch. Each patch will have its own review, but you can 
checkout the branch in one go, and the web UI will display the dependencies of 
the patches. For example, the three patches on 
http://server.kainhofer.com:8088/ are subsequent patches in one branch. See 
the individual patch's page for the dependencies.

-) It's pretty simple to set up on the server.
-) Each user MUST have an OpenID account somewhere to create the user, and to 
use git he needs to create and upload an SSH key. Login with user/pw like with 
git-cl is not possible. All pushing is ONLY done over ssh.

-) The web frontend does NOT work in Konqueror!!!

-) My impression is that gerrit is mainly intended to review patches that are 
completely finished and should be either applied without changes or completely 
discarded.
Also, it seems to make life easier for people who are git masters, but make 
life much harder for people who don't know git that well.

Cheers,
Reinhold

-- 
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Reinhold Kainhofer, address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial & Actuarial Math., Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria
 * http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/, DVR: 0005886
 * LilyPond, Music typesetting, http://www.lilypond.org