Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgaw | Hacker News Reader

It seems they are deprecating their standalone code review tool Upsource in favor of the code review tool that's integrated into Space.

Upsource is nice because it allows opening a review for a set of commits which aren't necessarily continuous. This way, multiple people can work on the same branch at the same time, and open a review for their respective commits afterwards. You don't need to wait for your coworker to have their review approved and their branch merged before you can start building on their work.

As far as I know, the other popular review tools (e.g. Github pull requests) only support reviews for entire branches.

Does anybody know another review tool which allows commit-based reviews as Upsource and Space do?

View on HN

I’m not familiar with Upsource, but what you describe sounds somewhat like the Gerrit review process. Each commit is reviewed individually, but sending multiple dependent commits for review is supported as well. It is technically possible for a coworker to build on top of your unsubmitted changes (by checking out your commits and adding more on top). However this process gets somewhat painful if the coworker updates their commits, which would require you to do a convoluted rebase.

I played with Upsource back when it was their "static-analysis in the cloud," and it actually was cool, but holy hell it was a beast to get up and running, and (just like Qodana that they're trying now) the static analysis was(is?) indescribably hard to configure correctly to get meaningful results

I've heard great things about Gerrit, but it also seems like one of those "strongly opinionated, mailing-list based" review systems, and trying to lobby for such a thing in the GitHub/GitLab web based world is practically a non-starter in my experience

Gerrit is pretty strongly opinionated, but it is not mailing-list based. Review notifications are sent via email, but otherwise everything needs to be done via the web UI (or other tool using the API).

Kind of.

If configured you can send your review by emails https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/intro-u...

If you get the an email you can read it from your mail client, retrieve the change from Gerrit over git (git fetch gerrit.example.org refs/changes/45/12345,8 && git checkout FETCH_HEAD), address the review and send back to Gerrit (git push gerrit.example.org HEAD:refs/for/main). Though to mark the review comments you would have to reply to the email or indeed head to the Web UI to mark them resolved.

One can send a review vote and message over ssh which is quite convenient to a point I locally have aliases +1 / +2 to do it directly from the command line instead of heading to the web browser.

The API is quite powerful (the Gerrit web UI entirely relies on the REST API). James E. Blair wrote a ncurses client for Gerrit there is a quick demo at https://ttygroup.org/gertty/index.html (Pypi page https://pypi.org/project/gertty/ ).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com