Using Gerrit for code review in KDE

[Kevin Kofler]

Jan Kundrát wrote:
> A random data point -- I asked a 3rd-party contributor to send a patch to
> Trojita through Gerrit earlier today. He accomplished that goal so fast
> that I asked him for an estimate on how much time it took. The answer was
> 15 minutes, including reading the docs and setting up the client-side
> hooks. Quite frankly, I don't think I was faster when I first used
> ReviewBoard.

Strange, because that's not at all the experience I had submitting patches 
to Qt/Gerrit compared to KDE/ReviewBoard.

In ReviewBoard, I export my patch from the git-cola menu and I submit it 
through a nice web interface that lets me input all the details (target 
branch, reviewers, etc.). I don't need to fire up a Konsole at all, nor read 
any documentation. It just works.

In Gerrit, I basically get an ugly command-line interface: I have to push to 
a magic ref encoding all the information (and IIRC, git-cola only lets me 
enter the basic refs/for/branchname, the special characters in stuff like 
%r=foo at example.com confuse it, so I'd have to push from a terminal if I want 
to use those). Setting reviewers requires a special command-line-style 
parameter appended to the ref that is found in the documentation (that %r= 
thing). There is also no autocompletion nor client-side validation of the 
reviewer nicks/addresses, unlike on ReviewBoard's friendly web interface.

And the next time I want to submit something to Gerrit, I'm sure I'll have 
to reread the documentation all over again, whereas ReviewBoard is dead 
simple.

I can see you liking Gerrit if you're used to juggling with obscure git 
command lines, but as a long-term user of Cervisia, kdesvn and now git-cola, 
I find a web submission interface much nicer to work with.

        Kevin Kofler