On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 2:01 AM, Paul Menzel
<paulepanter@users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
It might be also a good idea to ask that question on the flashrom list,
since they also use the infrastructure(?) and there are some Google
folks who maybe have experience with at least Gerrit.
I can't say that I am an advanced user, however for simple usage cases I find Gerrit to be excellent.
A few things I like about Gerrit:
- Very good web-based side-by-side context diffs (with syntax highlighting and other nice features of native apps like gdiff, kompare, etc). One can still download a patch and apply, but I think the web-based diff saves the reviewer *a lot* of time overall since changes don't need to be downloaded and applied (sometimes with conflict resolution involved). Saving the reviewers' time is critical.
- Better patch management. You can review side-by-side diffs of any patch revision. This is essential for reducing the burden of reviewing and to prevent patches from bit rotting IMHO. Especially true when the patch revision is >3.
- Comments *do* show up in e-mail. I think there is a way to reply to comments in e-mail as well, but I always just use the web interface.
- A plethora of log-in methods can be used. For chromium.org one can sign in using Open ID, a Google account, or a Yahoo account.
- One-click commits are handy since you don't need to worry about sync'ing your tree
There is a learning curve with git, but I think a concise wiki entry demonstrating some a simple workflow will help people get their toes wet quickly. It's clear that many contributors on this list are already familiar (and indeed eager) to use git.
Overall, I believe e-mail is fine up to a certain point, but Coreboot and Flashrom both have enough developers contributing that it's worth moving to a more advanced SCM. Especially since a lot of changes can linger for days or weeks since hardware scarcity can often limit the ability of reviewers and testers.
--
David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.