[coreboot] [RFC]Using gerrit for patch management (and jenkins for QA)

[David Hendricks]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 2:01 AM, Paul Menzel <
paulepanter at 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.
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