Another proposal for modernization of our infrastructure

[Eike Hein]

On 01/29/2015 06:24 PM, Milian Wolff wrote:
> Much nicer, I think!

I disagree - having the comment in a floating popup instead
of breaking up source code makes it easier to read the code
for me.

Personally, I agree that the gerrit UI is terrible to use.
It's not just the diff viewer, either. The general review
page layout is like someone spilled a jar of UI on the page.

Basic functionality like "Reply" is placed oddly, the history
view is useless-by-default by intially collapsing comments
and muddying up the excerpts with redundant preambles, ...
it's just really, really bad, and Phabricator blows it out
of the water.

For me, the strong suits of the gerrit proposal are:

* There's the psychological/branding advantage of using
   tooling that much of our middleware stack uses, which is
   a crowd we historically aren't culturally close to, at a
   cost to us. This might offset the cost of the daily frus-
   tration of having to work with shit UI.

   In this sense gerrit is the IBM Thinkpad of collabora-
   tion tools: It looks nerd. It's actively alienating to
   people who aren't willing to "look past the surface",
   and make no mistake, that's a comforting veneer to many
   engineers.

   Habituating developers to numb themselves to living with
   shit UI seems kinda dangerous in context of the software
   we are trying to make, though.

* gerrit appears to solve some problems well that are no
   less hard than good UI design, like replication. Tapping
   into that work is definitely attractive.

* I like that Jan is looking ahead at using tooling to
   improve our process, rather than just re-ticking boxes
   for things we already have.



Cheers,
Eike