Another proposal for modernization of our infrastructure

[Milian Wolff]

On Thursday 29 January 2015 16:27:52 Luca Beltrame wrote:
> Jan Kundrát wrote:
> > as promised, here is a proposal on how our infrastructure can be improved,
> > with emphasis on service integration. There are screenshots inside.
> 
> I'm not sure if this is the right thread for it, but as someone who commits
> patches very occasionally either through CLI or the web interface, I find
> Gerrit's UI to be pretty much clumsy and hard to understand, not to mention
> when reading reviews (points already raised by Martin G).
> 
> People can work around it, but IMO it's far too intimidating for people that
> only occasionally contribute patches.

I agree. But is that such a serious blocker that outweights all other 
benefits? As I just wrote in the other mail, I think its a problem we, as a 
community, can fix if required. I volunteer (after I come back from vacation 
in ~2 months ;-))!

Also note how parts of the issues raised by Martin, are "fixed" in e.g. the Qt 
Gerrit -- at least you can see all changes on one page.

Furthermore, as someone who actually worked with Gerrit quite a bit in the 
last months, I don't think that the UI is particularly intimidating or hard to 
use. Yes, it takes some time getting used to it. But how is that different 
from any other tool? Change always implicates we must learn something new!

To give an example: When you review code in Qt Gerrit, it's nice to see both 
the diff and the review comments inline. I find this much more useful, than 
the reviewboard UI which splits comments and actual code. Take e.g.:

https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/122169/diff/#

Here, I need to manually click on the commented-on lines to see what people 
wrote to a given changed line.

Take this on the other hand:
https://codereview.qt-project.org/#/c/89086/2//ALL

Much nicer, I think!

tl;dr; please do not rule-out Gerrit just because you don't know it (yet)!

Bye

-- 
Milian Wolff
mail at milianw.de
http://milianw.de