Another proposal for modernization of our infrastructure

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Wednesday 28 January 2015 11:52:17 Martin Klapetek wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 11:08 AM, Jan Kundrát <jkt at kde.org> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > as promised, here is a proposal on how our infrastructure can be improved,
> > with emphasis on service integration. There are screenshots inside.
> > 
> > Feedback is very welcome.
> 
> Thanks for putting that together.
> 
> One thing I still haven't seen anywhere in these threads is anything from
> the people
> currently testing the Gerrit on kio and plasma-framework and how they find
> that
> instance for usage in KDE. Their input should be quite valuable as they
> have real
> world experience with KDE + Gerrit which is the subject of this proposal.
> 
> I would be quite interested to hear those experiences and opinions - guys,
> can you
> please write something up?

As someone who has used our gerrit setup as a reviewer I can provide some 
feedback, but in order to evaluate properly I also want to test Phabricator 
once we have the first projects using it.

At the moment I must say that I find gerrit's web interface extremely 
cumbersome to use. This is something I experienced with both Qt's as well as 
KDE's setup. Navigation through the code is difficult, you cannot see the 
complete change in one, but have to go through each file. This is something I 
consider as unfortunate as normally I prefer reading the changes to the header 
before the implementation, but due to alphabetic ordering we do not have this. 
Unfortunately when navigating through the change to get to the header file the 
implementation is marked as "you have reviewed it". This is to me quite a step 
back compared to review board's code navigation. What I also find bad is that 
you actually need to know the "magic" keyboard shortcuts to use it in a sane 
way.  And the shortcuts are to be honest strange: "]" is a key which is great 
to use on an English layout but on many other layouts it's just a very 
cumbersome to use key.

I do not like the comment threading of review board, but I consider gerrit 
even worse. All comments are collapsed and you have to go to the diff to read 
the comments on the code. There is no threading at all involved. On review 
board we quite often have threaded discussions, but I cannot see how this 
could happen in gerrit. Similar issues marked as done: you get a nice list of 
done, done, done done, but actually have to go back to the  code change to see 
what it's about. I think this is much better done in review board.

Given that code review is the core competence of gerrit I'm rather 
disappointed by the offerings. The fact that it's totally awesomely integrated 
into git doesn't change much. Whether I do:
git push something magic:something other magic
or
rbt post -o --parent=somethingmagic

doesn't matter to me. It's a command I have to learn by heart. So the fact 
that it's git all to the heart: meh, don't care.

I'm looking forward to try out the competitor to make myself a clear picture.

Cheers
Martin G.
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