Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

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I use Gerrit at work and I do not recommend it to anyone. It's a half-assed tool that essentially turns Git into something that's worse than tarballs, diff+patch and an e-mailing list. The Gerrit UI is horrible, it can handle only one patch changes (worse than pull requests) and every time you upload a new patch, all your previous review comments are hidden with the old version of the patch.

Gerrit (and Android's repo) are based on cherry-picking and rebasing, not branching and merging. They will turn your history into a mess in any non-trivial setting. It also doesn't support Git submodule trees.

What the original article author wants is some kind of security. Git's way of doing that is GPG signatures.

My advice: if you have a choice, do NOT use Gerrit for anything. GitHub is gazillion times better.

(note: we might not be using the latest version of Gerrit, however it's so bad that I don't think a new version will help)

I've been regularly sending patch series to Gerrit, and it works fine. If you're not seeing the previous review comments that's because either (a) you're not adding the Change-ID: lines, or (b) you haven't tried diff'ing against the previous version of the patch (in which case the review comments will be clearly visible). Also, the review comments show up in e-mail, of course.

It's true that Android uses a lot of cherry-picking and rebasing, but that's because they have to support a large number of releases. That's a development process choice that the Android folks have made --- but it's not fundamental to Gerrit.

At least the modern versions of Gerrit have a lot of configuration options, some of which can be set on a per-user basis (via ACL settings). It's certainly not perfect, but it is actively being developed, and it is getting better...

The problem is that when I upload a new patch set for a change that already exists, all the review comments I had on the previous patch set are "lost". Also finding the differences between two patches in a change is difficult.

What I'd really want to do in this situation is to have a feature branch where I push another commit for review. The difference is clearly visible and I can get new review comments without losing the old ones. This works very well with Git and GitHub.

That's exactly how we use gerrit. The most recent change in our gerrit install is on its sixth revision:

   http://review.couchbase.org/8560

I pulled this one arbitrarily, it just happened to be the top. It's got a dependency and they change together. It works flawlessly and almost entirely transparently as long as you have a Change-Id (for which there's a simple hook to generate).

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