Re: Working towards a common review format for git

[Richard Ipsum <richard.ipsum@codethink.co.uk>]

On Fri, Jan 08, 2016 at 09:53:53AM -0500, Dave Borowitz wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 9:24 AM, Dave Borowitz <dborowitz@google.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 9:08 AM, Richard Ipsum
> > <richard.ipsum@codethink.co.uk> wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> In a prior email I mentioned in passing a library I've been working
> >> on to try to reach a common format for storing review content in git:
> >> perl-notedb.[1]
> >>
> >> I'm making reasonable progress with this but my work has uncovered
> >> necessary (and trivial) modifications to Notedb, the first[2] is a
> >> trivial modification to ensure the 'Status' trailer gets written
> >> to the commit when a change's status changes.
> >
> > I would consider this a bugfix, and will respond on that review.
> >
> >> The second[3] is an RFC
> >> where I suggest adding a 'Commit' trailer so that it is always
> >> possible to reference the commit under review by its sha.
> >
> > I think this is probably fine but I'll have to think about it some more.
> >
> >> With these patches applied to gerrit it's possible for perl-notedb to parse
> >> all meta content from notedb and map it to the actual git content
> >> under review. However, my concern at present is that I'm already
> >> operating under a fork of notedb which defeats the objective of
> >> collaborating to produce a standard format, let's try to avoid[4]
> >
> > I hope I can assuage some of your concerns by saying that since Gerrit
> > notedb is such a work in progress, literally nobody is running it in
> > the wild, so even if the formats diverge temporarily I don't see it as
> > being a long-term issue. But thank you for caring about it, I do
> > appreciate your proactive considerations.

Thanks, that's good to know,
thanks also for reviewing the modifications I mentioned. :)

> 
> You know what would probably also be a good idea would be to spec out
> the entire format in a standalone document. That way when Gerrit
> doesn't have something implemented, it's clear that Gerrit is wrong,
> not that it's trying to fork the format.

I think that would be good, I could attempt to write a spec for the format
and post it here for review? I expect I'll want to work a little more on
perl-notedb before I do that though.