Another proposal for modernization of our infrastructure

[Alex Merry]

On Wednesday 28 January 2015 13:14:14 Martin Gräßlin wrote:
> 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.

On Wednesday 28 January 2015 14:07:34 Milian Wolff wrote:
> Also note that you do not:
> 
> - need to ammend the commit to include a REVIEW: line
> - need to specify -g yes when updating reviews
> - need to specify the -r $REVIEWID line when updating reviews
> - need to update individual commits, each by running rbt post and specifing
> the git hash manually
> 
> all in all, this makes it /much/ simpler to use than rbt.

I kind of agree with both of these - gerrit makes following discussion an 
absolute pain, and reviewing code hardly pleasant, but it's automatic change-
id assignation, rather than the error-prone REVIEW keyword, is a major plus 
point.

rbt now provides a "stamp" method, and I believe phabricator's tool does as 
well, but I haven't tried them to see how easy they are (and I'd want them to 
be automagic).

Alex