The right tool for the job!? -- was Re: gerrit for 3-6, LibreOffice gerrit bot & wrong Merged status

[David Ostrovsky]

Hi Bjoern,

On 16.07.2012 02:45, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 10:53:42PM +0200, David Ostrovsky wrote:
>> >Huh?! What is that for? it makes no sense for me to simultaneously
>> >submit to gerrit and to push directly to master (and thus bypass
>> >gerrit).
> Yes, it does make sense. You can push to master directly and still do the
> (required) review for the release branch on gerrit.
>

i am afraid, that you just try to translate your current (old) workflow 
and try to (re)-shape the new tool to match it.
My understanding was (and is) that new tool requires new thinking, new 
approach and ... yes new workflow.

But hej if you just want a code review system that match your current 
workflow, i seriously recommend you to take a look at
Attlasian's crucible: http://www.atlassian.com/software/crucible/overview/
(and yes it has free license for open source projects and one of my 
customers uses it sucessfully on their site.)

The main difference between gerrit and crucible is however: gerrit 
resides in front of your main repo and crucible resides behind it.
To review something in crucible you have to first push it in your repo 
and then ask your changes to be reviewed. With each iteration
you must commit it again and update the version of affected files in 
review. So all intermidiate steps still hit your main repo.

The main advantage of gerrit is that it enables you to keep your main 
repo clean and first let some changes hit it
if and only if your change was reviewed and verified. It it is not sane, 
then the author have a chance to make a number of iterrations
and resubmit it as a number of patchsets and keep these intermidiate 
steps off your main repo.

But by letting still push everything (forever ?) to master directly and 
then bypass gerrit you jeopardise its main advantage: junk in junk out.
So if you want to do only half code review (always bypass master) then, 
save your time and make your life easier (and life of your developers) ...
use crucible or ... don't do code review at all.

Regards
David