Re: [RFC] switch to Gerrit

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Fri, Feb 7, 2020 at 5:09 PM Jonas Hahnfeld <address@hidden> wrote:

> Am Freitag, den 07.02.2020, 12:09 +0100 schrieb Han-Wen Nienhuys:
> > n the spirit for providing competing options, I hereby offer a Gerrit
> > RFC. Note that I'm an obvious fan of Gerrit, but Gitlab seems an
> > acceptable solution to me too.
>
> Thanks for writing this up! Even if I said I didn't like Gerrit in the
> past, I would certainly find my way to use it should we agree on it as
> a tool. And it looks like the tool has improved a lot since I last
> tried to understand it.
>
> > [RFC] Gerrit for LilyPond
> >
> > Right now, LilyPond's source code is hosted on Savannah [1], our issues
> > are tracked on SourceForge [2] and we review patches on Rietveld [3].
> > There is no synchronization between the systems and a contributor is
> > required to synchronize the review and the associated issue.
> >
> > I propose to start using self-hosted Gerrit for doing code
> > reviews and code review status tracking. Gerrit has integrated Git
> > hosting, and integrated code viewing
>
> Hm, a presentation by Google itself claims that "Gerrit does not
> provide [...] Code Browsing, Code Search" [1] If I look on GerritHub,
> it has links to GitHub [2] and that's something we don't want to use as
> far as I understand.
>
> 1:
> https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1C73UgQdzZDw0gzpaEqIC6SPujZJhqamyqO1XOHjH-uk/edit#slide=id.g4d6c16487b_1_140
> 2: https://review.gerrithub.io/admin/repos/q/filter:lilypond
>
>
The Gerrit code per se does not have browsing, but it has hooks to expose a
viewer in the UI. Some sites use the CGit viewer, but there is also
gitiles, which is a plugin, and will also respect Gerrit permissions.
Gitiles source code is here:

  https://gerrit.googlesource.com/plugins/gitiles/

that link is served from gitiles.  Gitiles is a "core" plugin for gerrit.

I filed a bug about the code viewer on gerrithub (the URLs are malformed.)

> > Gerrit includes an (optional) code browser.
>
> Oh, so maybe that's a new feature? (see note above) Does this work on
> GerritHub, can we see this in action somewhere?
>

see above.


> > Gerrit offers full takeout of review data through git. See here
> >
> >
> >
> https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gerrit/+/refs/changes/15/252615/meta%5E%21/#F1
> >
> >
> > for the data behind
> >
> >
> > https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/gerrit/+/252615
>
> That's pretty cool, but requires the server to be available. Does it
> have offline backups / export?
>
>
Yes!  try

  git clone --mirror https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gerrit

and then do "git show-ref".



> > Disadvantages
> > =============
> >
> > The workflow (which uses git rebase and git commit --amend) requires
> > more fluency with Git than GH/GL, and will create an additional
> > barrier to new contributors.
> >
> > Gerrit lacks an issue tracker or integrated CI solution
> >
> > Gerrit lacks "community" features, such as Wiki, @mentions, etc.
>
> Can't you request review from somebody? That would probably be enough
> to model the current workflow.
>

Yes, you can.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen