While Gerrit's UI is not the best, I can work around that for the most part.
What bugs me the most about Gerrit are two things:
(a) A single commit is always the unit of review: While that is
reasonable in many cases, in other cases, what ought to be a unit of
review is a topic branch. So, the committer has to have an option of
submitting a series of commits for review rather than a single commit.
This is useful for example when you are working on a series of dependent
changes which go together. This also gets around the baffling use of
commit amends as a way to fix problems. Other reasonable ways of
making changes are by adding commits that fix the problems highlighted
on a review. This could be supported when a topic branch is a unit of
review. Then the appropriate action on a review is to submit fixes. In
fact, I would think that a reasonable design of a review tool would
automatically branch a commit when a reviewer suggests a fix. If the
reviewer finds the commit acceptable, the commit goes through without a
branch.
(b) Commit amends hide evolution of an idea and the tradeoffs and
considerations that went into development of something -- the reviews
are all separate from git commit history. All that is seen is the
final amended commit -- the discussion and the arguments even that
inform the commit are lost. Instead, if as in (a), a topic branch was
explicitly (or automatically created when a reviewer rejects a commit),
and fixes are additional commits, then, review documentation could be
part of the commit history of git and shows the considerations that went
into developing something and the evolution of an idea.
There was an email recently on wikitext-l where Mark Bergsma was asked
to squash his commits
(http://osdir.com/ml/general/2012-07/msg20847.html) -- I personally
think it is a bad idea that is a result of the gerrit review model. In
a different review model, a suggestion like this would not be made.
More than the UI, it is (a) and (b) which bother me more. I am not
sure if any existing review tool out there supports such a review
process, but if there is, I would support one.
Subbu.
Hi everyone,
It appears as though the discussion has continued apace for the Gerrit
evaluation process:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Git/Gerrit_evaluation
Thank you everyone for chipping in so far. The current format is a
mix of talk page and structured discussion, which seems ok for now.
It would appear from reading this page that the only alternative to
Gerrit that has a serious following is GitHub. Is that the case?
Personally, it seems like Phabricator or Barkeep has the best chance
of dislodging Gerrit, but those won't probably get serious
consideration without a champion pushing them.
Rob
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