[Mesa-dev] Improved Patch review using Gerrit

[Andreas Hartmetz]

On Wednesday 08 May 2013 13:33:37 Eric Anholt wrote:
> Christoph Brill <egore911 at egore911.de> writes:
> > Hi list,
> > 
> > I'm trying to follow the patches and patchsets sent to mesa-dev and
> > really like the process of how they get reviewed. It's a good way of
> > catching bugs before they get committed. But currently this approach
> > has a downside (at least for me): It's easy to miss a patch and
> > happens from time to time to others as well (see
> > http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2013-May/039178.html )
> > 
> > Has anyone thought about using Gerrit for code reviews (like done for
> > Libreoffice at https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/ )? I like the way it
> > integrates with git and might be a good idea to use for mesa-dev (and
> > maybe even dri-devel) as well.
> 
> Yeah, we've thought about it, and even asked fdo admins to install a
> jenkins setup for continuous integration as a prelude to possibly
> putting in gerrit to get testing along with the review process.  The
> major downside to gerritt that I see is the loss of offline reviewing of
> patches, which is how I do basically all my patch review.

In Gerrit, every patch has instructions to pull and merge it into your local 
repository. That's more of a hassle than just using your e-mail client, 
obviously, but it can probably be scripted on the client side to create one 
branch per patch set, so it could work in the offline case.
What will probably not work as easily is seeing the comments added by others.