Gerrit alternatives

[Andrew Geissler]

On Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 7:26 PM, Dave Cobbley
<david.j.cobbley at linux.intel.com> wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> I am curious to see peoples input on using github as a code review mechanism
> over gerrit. I see github/openbmc is already used quite well for sprint
> planning and issue tracking, I feel like it would make a lot of sense to use
> it for doing code reviews. As far as I understand it has a mechanism to
> reproduce a similar paradigm to what we currently use today - as far as
> Code-Review, Ok-To-Test, and Verified.
>
> I can see github has made several improvements over the last few years that
> make it much more use-able to teams like us:
>
> - The ability to have approved maintainers for each specific repository with
> https://github.com/blog/2392-introducing-code-owners
>
> - It has the ability to do a rebase-merge, keeping the git tree nice and
> tidy.
>
> - A strong API to tie in additional tools that we may need.
>
>
> Additionally, it will reduce the point of failure from also hosting gerrit.
>
> What are peoples thoughts on using this?

As the guy who ended up having to maintain the current gerrit server,
I'm all for an alternative :)

But my problem is I really like gerrit.  github has def made some
improvements to the review process though.  I see it has per-line
comment ability now.

I have a pull request out here for a non-gerrit openbmc repo if
someone wants to look around -
https://github.com/openbmc/openbmc-tools/pull/5

One thing I really like is how gerrit allows you to iterate over a
commit.  Someone makes some comments, you respond, upload a new patch
set.  My understanding with github is you basically just keep adding
on new commits in a pull request to address comments.  A feature I use
all the time in gerrit is to look at the diff between a patch set I
last reviewed and the latest one.  Also, I don't see an obvious
mechanism in github to provide the different score levels
(-2,-1,+1,+2)?  The gerrit dashboard is also really nice, providing me
a nice easy way to see what's on my review list and what the current
size and scores of those reviews are (for all repos in openbmc).

We also base a lot of our current CI infrastructure off of gerrit
events.  I think most of it can be switched over to using github, but
it's not inconsequential.

Our current gerrit VM costs on the order of $60 a year....so you get
what you pay for.  I've been poking around IBM trying to see if we can
get something a bit more production worthy.

Andrew

>
> -Dave Cobbley
>