Update on Gerrit deployment

[Andy Green]

On 08/28/2011 05:20 AM, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> On Sat, 2011-08-27 at 21:29 +0800, Andy Green wrote:
>> On 08/27/2011 02:15 AM, Somebody in the thread at some point said:
>>> Gerrit is that it doesn't care if the tree has been rebased. It will
>>> just try and merge the changeset on top of the current tree, whatever
>>> the history so in that case Gerrit is actually enabling developers to
>>> work with trees that are continually rebased (like the linux kernel).
>>
>> Linus' tree is a history tree, fwiw.
>>
>> For kernel, gerrit users even generating the patches to propose requires
>> git.  So gerrit is just a sort of secondary 'social' option on top of
>> git, which remains mandatory.
>>
>> I want to respect people's contribution, but I don't see how external
>> voting on patches is going to help me: either it fits at my tree's
>> level, has a use and doesn't conflict in which case I'll take it, or
>> it's not going to work out for me and it won't work out any better if
>> one or more people clicked +1 on it.
>>
>> I don't think we can dispense with one person attempting to understand
>> what the patches are and what they buy us, what their future is and if
>> they want them which trees they go on, etc, by a kind of
>> isithotornot.linaro.org.
>
> I think you're greatly mis-characterizing what gerrit does. *No one*
> maintains a code tree like a democracy.

I went and looked at it last week, clicked around a bit and report what 
I saw.

> I too suspect the voting (which is really just review logging, something
> most mature projects require and use, be it "Acked-by" lines or
> whatever) won't be of much use to us, as we're still fairly loose with
> our change management and we trust tree maintainers.

Yeah.

> As a maintainer, I think the formal submission tracking (ie: here are
> changes submitted that have not yet been included) is really the part
> that is potentially valuable to us. It makes sure the work folks submit
> doesn't just get lost in churn and busy crunches.
>
> Additionally, a more minor perk is that it allows series of patches to
> be merged without the manual plucking from your inbox, saving to files,
> copying them to my git tree server, and then git am'ing them in.
>
> Now, again, I'm not a fan of gerrit. And outside of the Android work, I
> *really* don't see it providing any value to Linaro (personally I'd like
> to see a tool more like patchworks integrated with git that provides the
> same benefits as above).
>
> But I've got an open mind and am willing to try it out and figure out a
> workflow. I suspect for me it really won't be anything other then a
> different location to "git push" to.

I think we are having different takes on it (although I appreciate 
reading your somewhat nuanced view) because application of patches 
doesn't mean for me what it means to a history branch.

The patch does not just go on top of HEAD and then you're done, it needs 
to be placed at the right topic branch layer in tracking; may need to be 
adapted to apply to an intermediate branch (eg, tilt-3.0) that is on a 
different pinned release basis, then the intermediate branch rebased 
against the final basis like, eg, your android tree to provide the final 
output.

Can Gerrit understand or track that?

> If we do actually start to see an inflow of kernel patches through
> gerrit, we can see how that workflow functions and have a concrete
> discussion on pros and cons (worse case, I git cherry pick the commits I
> like to my tree and push it out, or we can ask to see if gerrit can be
> configured to mail patches to us). But I really really doubt this will
> be a common thing.
>
> Again, I've volunteered to lead the way on the kernel side in this trial
> run, and (while there have been some initial configuration hiccups) it
> really has been almost zero overhead/impact to my workflow so far.
>
> (And forgive me for posting and running here, as I'm out of the office
> for the next two weeks - including Linux Plumbers, so I may not respond
> to further replies for some time. So feel free to have the last word. :)

Hey you're forgiven dude ^^  Have a nice time at Plumbers.

-Andy

-- 
Andy Green | TI Landing Team Leader
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