openstack team mailing list archive

[Jay Pipes <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 1:01 PM, Dan Prince <dan.prince@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Couple of comments:
>
> 1) While gerrit is integrated w/ Launchpad (and can close tickets) Launchpad
> is not integrated with Gerrit. Things like referencing a branch from within
> a ticket or blueprint aren't going to work as well as they used to right?

Actually, this is being worked on:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-ci/+bug/823173

> 2) I'd like to see a unified diff containing all the files on the Gerrit
> review pages. Is there a way to do this or am I missing something?

Also being worked on, by the Nokia team and should be in the next
release of Gerrit:
I think this is the feature issue:
http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=106

That being said, after using the "next changed source file" links,
I've actually changed my mind about using a single diff for larger
commits with lots of files changed. Sometimes it's actually nice to
scroll through them. But, having the option to have a single page diff
would be useful at times, too...

> 3) The branch/refspec names Gerrit uses are not very user friendly. In
> Launchpad we typically had people naming their branches w/ either a
> feature/fix name or the ticket number. So in Launchpad my branch would be
> called something like 'lp:~dan-prince/fix_ec2_metadata' or whatever. In
> Gerrit the branch names up for review are rather cryptic
> 'refs/changes/76/176/1' which means that when trying to track and Gate
> branches before they hit trunk we are going to manually have to do an extra
> bit of detective work to make sense of which tickets and features a
> particular refspec corresponds to. Some extra tooling might might this
> easier but I really dislike that we have no control over the branch names
> that are up for review.

I will let Jim and Monty talk about this.

> Lastly I kind of feel like we've bee dupped. When we talked about Git code
> hosting on GitHub at the conference some of the major points were improved
> code review (on GitHub) and performance improvements for checkouts, etc.
> While we may have taken a step forward on the performance front IMHO we've
> taken a major step backwards as far as the review and tracking process goes.

I explained the deficiencies in GitHub's pull request system for
integration with an automated patch queue manager and gated trunk.
Could you point to a review you've done in Gerrit so far that we can
use as a starting point for discussion on what improvements can be
made relative to the "GitHub process"? I couldn't find any reviews
that you've done in Gerrit.

Thanks,
jay

> Dan
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Jay Pipes" <jaypipes@xxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Monday, August 8, 2011 2:50pm
> To: openstack@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [Openstack] Status of Git/Gerrit Code Hosting/Review
>
> Hello all,
>
> tl;dr
> =======
>
> Contributors have been giving Monty Taylor and Jim Blair feedback on
> the Gerrit code review system over the last few weeks. Both the
> Keystone and Glance projects have now migrated to using Git as their
> source control system and Gerrit for code review and integration into
> the Jenkins continuous integration system.
>
> Tomorrow, the Project Policy Board (PPB) will be voting on two things:
>
> 1) Should OS projects
> a) have a vetted set of options for hosting and review, or
> b) be required to use a single toolset for review and hosting
> 2) Shall Gerrit+Git be included in the set of vetted options or be the
> single option (dependent on the vote result for 1) above)
>
> Feedback on #2 is most welcome. Please feel free to respond to this
> email, catch us on IRC or email me directly.
>
> Links:
>
> Working with Gerrit: http://wiki.openstack.org/GerritWorkflow
> Code Review in Gerrit: http://review.openstack.org
>
> Details
> =======
>
> Over the last few weeks, Monty Taylor and Jim Blair have been working
> with a number of OpenStack contributors to gather feedback on a
> Git-based development workflow, toolset, and review process.
>
> First, Monty and Jim investigated whether GitHub's pull request system
> would be sufficient to enforce existing code review and approval
> policies. It was determined that GitHub's pull request system was not
> sufficient. The main reason why the pull request system failed to meet
> needs is that there is no overall way to track the current state of a
> given pull request. While this is fine for the simple case (merge
> request is accepted and merged) it starts to fall over with some of
> the more complex back and forths that we wind up having in many
> OpenStack projects. Additionally, this assessment was predicated on
> the current design of a gated trunk with an automated patch queue
> manager, and a system where a developer is not required to spend time
> landing a patch (other than potential needs for rebases or changes due
> to code review).
>
> Monty and Jim then decided to set up a Gerrit server for code review
> and CI integration at http://review.openstack.org. Gerrit is a tool
> developed by Google to address some of the functionality the Android
> Open Source team needed around automated patch queue management and
> code reviews.
>
> The first project that moved from Launchpad to Gerrit/Git was the
> openstack-ci project. This is the glue code and scripts that support
> the continuous integration environment running on
> http://jenkins.openstack.org.
>
> After gaining some experience with Gerrit through the migration of
> this project from Launchpad, the next OpenStack subproject to move to
> the Gerrit platform was the Keystone incubated project. Keystone was
> already using git for source control and was on GitHub, using GitHub's
> Issues for its pull requests and bug tracking. However, the Keystone
> source code was not gated by a non-human patch queue management
> system; a Keystone developer would manually merge proposed branches
> into the master Keystone source tree, and code reviews were not passed
> through any automated tests on http://jenkins.openstack.org. Monty and
> Jim worked with Dolph, Yogi, Ziad, and other Keystone developers to
> get their code reviews done via Gerrit and get their unit and
> functional tests running on each commit through Jenkins. There were a
> few hiccups along the way, but the hiccups served as valuable lessons
> and were documented in the workflow wiki page
> http://wiki.openstack.org/GerritWorkflow.
>
> Last Thursday morning, the Glance project was migrated from Bazaar and
> Launchpad code hosting to use Git and Gerrit. The migration went
> pretty smoothly, and a number of Glance developers have already been
> proposing, reviewing, and approving code via Gerrit. Launchpad is used
> for all bug tracking and blueprint management, still, but the code at
> http://code.launchpad.net/glance is merely a read-only mirror of the
> git repository.
>
> Outstanding Issues/Questions
> =====================
>
> 1) John Dickinson and Chuck Thier raised the question that if Gerrit
> is going to be the (or one of the) proposed code review and patch
> management system, that hosting Git repositories on GitHub might be
> confusing for GitHub users, since most would expect to use pull
> requests to merge their own code back into the project's master repo.
> This is a valid concern and Monty and Jim are investigating
> establishing a GitWeb or Gitorious server on http://git.openstack.org
> that would serve as the canonical Git repo locations for OpenStack
> projects instead of GitHub. This would be similar to how
> http://git.kernel.org works
>
> 2) Only code hosting has been moved to Git/Gerrit. There are currently
> no plans to discuss moving bug tracking for existing OpenStack core
> projects to GitHub Issues. Gerrit is fully integrated with Launchpad
> bug tracking. This means that Gerrit *will close* (mark Fix Committed)
> Launchpad bugs if you include bug text in your commit message.
>
> 3) The user interface for Gerrit is UGLY. I don't think anyone would
> disagree with that. :) That said, Gerrit's UI can be modified via CSS
> and templates without having to keep a separate fork of Gerrit. If you
> are interested in helping Monty and Jim make the Gerrit UI prettier
> and saving reviewers eyeballs, please do contact me.
>
> Cheers,
> -jay
>
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