[U-Boot] u-boot gerrit server

[Tom Rini <trini@ti.com>]

On Fri, Nov 15, 2013 at 08:18:43PM +0100, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> Dear Vadim Bendebury (????),
> 
> In message <CAC3GErFfUaLUZryxW+A1J3yrmgPWWzcMfoVkP8b=Yj7ksznUDw@mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> >
> > - upload all patches to gerrit
> > - go to the web interface of the first patch in the series (by this
> > time gerrit would have a stack of patches showing their dependencies),
> > click on "review" - at this point gerrit would open a form to type the
> > cover message in
> > - once you finish composing the message you click on "publish
> > comments" and it gets sent to everybody who was picked as the
> > reviewer, and to default addresses, if any are configured (which of
> > course could be u-boot at lists.denx.de, for instance)
> 
> Basically this means _all_ new tools.  Instead of using your
> well-known editor of choice with all the tons of provate macros and
> keyboard shortcuts you have build in your whole professional life you
> start filling out forms.  Instead of using your well-known mail-tool
> with all the customizations you have added to help you to do what you
> are used to do you have something new.

Depends on your macros.  If you use FireFox, the plugin "It's all Text!"
lets you throw any input field into $EDITOR.  Some of the saftey
features of Chrome dis-allow this type of plugin, sadly.  So some things
are different (you don't quote the code hunk in question), but some are
not.  So, it's different.

> And all is web driven - or is it?
> 
> Is any of this scriptable?  Or can it be controlled by e-mail
> messages?

So, in another message Vadim pointed out a cli tool for gerrit that can
do certain things.  You cannot do the code reviews via CLI or e-mail.
You can do other things like mark as verified (so a CI could come along
and whack that in, automatically), inspect (I don't know if that means
grab to local git branch so you can see or open a browser window with
the item in question or what) and a few other things.

> > Once thing I have to mention: gerrit is notorious for sending tons of
> > email, while this is being worked on, in the meantime some more
> > rigorous email filtering might be very useful.
> 
> My initial touch of a feeling of indisposition in the stomach appears
> to be growing into some more severe sicknes :-(

Yes.  I think that for the emails, for example, we would have to have
something in the middle and some procmail or similar rules.

> > > Can we at least get all reviews sent to the ML?
> > 
> > The problem with this is that when reviews are sent to the mailing
> > list, they are for different custodians, trees, etc. It looks like
> > appx. half of them applies cleanly to the master branch, the rest do
> > not. Is there a way to tell what branch the patch is detined to by
> > looking at the email?
> > 
> > A much more robust approach is to have users push patches directly,
> > and set up branches/projects on the server, as required.
> 
> So this means gerrit is a make-or-break conversion.  Is there no way
> to allow old die-hards (like me) to stick to their well-known and
> highly optimized work to work environment?

Depends on which part of the flow?  You stopped using CVS at some point.
And many of us have switched from bk or other tools, to git.  So turning
"git send-email ..." into "git push ..." will only suck for a bit.
Turning review from mail to web, well, that's different.  I say, look at
https://u-boot-review.googlesource.com/#/c/1221/ and see how you would
have reviewed and commented there, rather than on the ML.

> My understanding from your description is that we cannot even try this
> out for some time while running the old way in parallel - we have to
> do either this or that, and as soon as we switch to gerrit there is
> not even a smooth way back - at least not without losing all the
> activities done in gerrit?

Depends on the activity a bit, I think, and how much we filter the
messages.  What I was asking about would be how we might migrate from a
google-gerrit to a local-gerrit, should the service go away.

-- 
Tom
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