Workflow Idea for 4.10

[Ignat Semenov]

Ben Cooksley wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 7:58 PM, Ignat Semenov <ragnarokk91 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> Hello fellow KDE devs!
>>
>> While I'm not an experienced developer nor manager, the planned
>> transition to gerrit really troubles me. In particular, I have the
>> following questions:
>>
>> 1)The gerrit installation used in qt makes it impossible to add comments
>> other than directly to the diff. No way to add comments on the main
>> review request page as it is in the RB installation we're currently
>> using. Is there any way to overcome that limitation?
>>
>> 2)The user interface of gerrit is horrible to say the least. The diff /
>> comment area is the last class citizen there. RR is way more clear and
>> user- friendly (esp. newcomers).
>>
>> 3)Does this transition mean we will have to use the full gerrit
>> contribution cycle, like it is in qt now, with branches and the special
>> tools, even for the smallest fixes? This will drive off new contributors,
>> I'm afraid.
> 
> Direct contributions by those people who have a KDE Developer account
> will always be possible and will never be forced to go through Gerrit.
> 
> Whilst code review is a nice thing, it is completely unnecessary with
> trivial changes or minor bugfixes. How it is used with larger changes
> is up to the projects themselves - but use of it will never be
> compulsory - direct access will always be available.
> 
OK, I see. Actually, there is a bit of a problem there ATM, in my opinion, 
in that very few projects seem to be using ReviewBoard. Plasma, KWin and 
Telepathy are the main users of RB, with some occasional kdelibs requests, 
from what I can see. I think we have a lot more projects being developed? :)
>>
>> 4)The Qt gerrit installation requires authentication just to browse the
>> existing requests read-only. Is it possible to do it differently or is
>> this a shortcoming of gerrit ( or its "design feature")? Pretty user- and
>> newcomer-unfriendly, too.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Ignat Semenov
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Plasma-devel at kde.org
>> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-devel
> 
> Regards,
> Ben Cooksley
> KDE Sysadmin

Oh, and One More Thing (TM).It is impossible to add a detailed description 
to the change with the Qt installation of gerrit. You can only use the 
commit message for that, and commit messages, while in theory unlimited, 
still have some rules applied to them, and present only the gist of the 
change. What if I want to elaborate on the reasons of a particular design / 
code decision, or tell a story of the various approaches attempted, etc? It 
is impossibel to add any comments or text besides what is in the commit 
message.

Given all those limitations of Gerrit (some of them may actually be the 
limitations of the Qt Gerrit installation), it looks like a clear downgrade 
form ReviewBoard to me.

Best regards,
Ignat Semenov