Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 2, 2016 2:36 UTC (Sun) by chmouel (subscriber, #6335)
Parent article: Why kernel development still uses email

as for the gerrit workflow part greg is comparing it to the android workflow not gerrit, people on OpenStack or Mediawiki have been using gerrit very successfully and it's only completed cause the AOSP use of gerrit wants it to be. There is around 110k commit merged per year on OpenStack from around 3300 different authors according to http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 2, 2016 4:18 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I'll have to take your word for it, that site wasn't fully loaded after 2 minutes of waiting...

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 2, 2016 5:07 UTC (Sun) by prometheanfire (subscriber, #65683) [Link] (2 responses)

Was just about to mention this (openstack specifically). Gerrit also has offline access via the gertty cli client.

Now, if only zuul scaled more...

I was able to access http://activity.openstack.org/dash/browser/ just fine :D

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 6, 2016 0:25 UTC (Thu) by ruscur (guest, #104891) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't know much about zuul, what are its scaling limitations?

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 6, 2016 4:27 UTC (Thu) by prometheanfire (subscriber, #65683) [Link]

I'm not too sure, I just know it's been complained about on the openstack infra irc channel.

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 2, 2016 7:17 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (2 responses)

IIRC Gerrit fits mediawiki because they typically have small changes. I can't figure out how to use gerrit sanely for a patch set (and was forced to merge several logical changes to one by reviewers to simplify the review).

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 2, 2016 9:02 UTC (Sun) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

If by "patch set" you mean "a collection of patches that should be merged as a set" then the easiest (I believe) is to push it as a branch and then review the merge. For this reason we allow anyone to create to "bug" branches.

Still, even within a series each patch should be individually reviewable. If people want to do more complicated things they should pull the branch locally.

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 2, 2016 10:09 UTC (Sun) by anatolik (guest, #73797) [Link]

> I can't figure out how to use gerrit sanely for a patch set

Just submit the changes and add "topic" field for it to tell that is related patches. Android project internally has a buildbot that takes this topic field to test and submit changes atomically. AFAIK if one submits such change manually then Gerrit will ask you "do you want to submit whole series?".

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 2, 2016 7:58 UTC (Sun) by fasaxc (guest, #111485) [Link] (2 responses)

I've submitted patches to OpenStack. Once you're set up Gerrit is, well Gerrit; it's OK but it has the warts mentioned in the article. Setting it up, however, was a royal PITA involving: registering as an OpenStack member, registering with Launchpad, synchronising my email address between the two (or getting an obtuse error message), uploading signing keys, associating my account with the company account, choosing the right sort of membership from a confusing list of options (described in legalese), coordinating signing of CLA with legal, installing and learning gerrit's review tool. And it still logs me out every 30 minutes, losing whatever comment I was working on.

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 3, 2016 5:43 UTC (Mon) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

You understand most of that is unrelated to Gerrit itself?

> installing and learning gerrit's review tool

Installing the Gerrit/git server?

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 6, 2016 16:04 UTC (Thu) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

At least on my package it was a simple matter of installing the package git-review. Though IIRC the version in Debian Stable is usable but lacks one feature (backporting, IIRC) that is used with the local server.

Why kernel development still uses email

Posted Oct 6, 2016 13:42 UTC (Thu) by isotopp (subscriber, #99763) [Link]

The fact that something is done or used by Openstack should maybe taken as an indicator to do the opposite.