gerrit for release branches (bots ftw?)

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 11:58 AM, Petr Mladek <pmladek at suse.cz> wrote:
>
> This handles only people with commit access and review for stable
> branches. It does not handle newbies.

commit upstream first... so commit to master
in most case adding a patch to a release branch consist in
cherry-picking it from master... so it is already committed somehow,
regardless of the status of the original author.

'newbies' today do not push anything at all to master or otherwise..
on the other hand, one could push a commit for consideration for a
release branch without having commit access at all: so gerrit would
actually be more newby friendly in that regard

>
>
> Hmm, this is not much encouraging:
>
>        + "git push" is easy.

When gerrit handle the main repo (i.e fdo becomes read-only), the
workflow would be simplified.

>        + if there are conflict, who and how would resolve them in
>          gerrit?

the conflict can show up at 2 stages:
1/ when the commit is cherry picked fo consideration for release
branch, beore it is pushed to gerrit. tha case is handle the same way
it is today
2/ when another commit hit the release branch before the current
commit is 'merged'. that case should be ery rare and when that appen
the 'Publish' operation should fail.
at that point one need to go back to one;s tree, pull -r fix the
problem and push again the newly updated patch for review.
gerrit use the ChangeId (which would remain teh same here) to identify
that you are pushing a new version of the 'same' patch. at that point
we are back in the normal workflow

>        + you need to write a comment when approving the change anyway;
>          some more words might motive the volunteer to come again, so
>          the gerrit tool might be rather antisocial

You can and are encouraged to write comment in gerrit when
Reviewing/Verifying... There i no difference there. you could Reply-to
with just 'Thanks, pushed' or a longer message, just like you can be
as verbose or terse in the message that accompany your +2 on Review.

Norbert