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Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Making your project more openŠhowto enable Gerrit

Three words: "Fetch from Gerrit…". Can't beat that for downloading a change and trying it out.

From: John Arthorne <John_Arthorne@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Cross project issues <cross-project-issues-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Monday, 7 October, 2013 9:51 AM
To: Cross project issues <cross-project-issues-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Making your project more openŠhowto enable Gerrit

Doug Schaefer <dschaefer@xxxxxxx> wrote on 10/04/2013 06:47:08 PM:

> No they're not. I can't see any way that patches in bugzilla are easier
> than gerrit. It's one "Push to Gerrit" and one "Publish and Submit" clicks
> away from getting a contribution made and accepted.

The "Submit" button is a bit dangerous that way. For most changes you can't thoroughly review it without trying it out, which means loading it into your local workspace. For a bugzilla patch you can paste it directly into the navigator so it really can't be beat (about four keystrokes for the whole process to copy/paste the patch). Whether you use UI or command line, Gerrit is a bit more work there.

But really which is mechanically easier is not the point with Gerrit. By creating a branch for each change, Gerrit is setting up a much richer structure that will naturally be a bit more work but also much more powerful. Gerrit really shines on big changes that take several iterations. For example comparing the latest patch against either master or any previous draft is very easy to do in Gerrit, and very difficult with patch files. Being able to flag each file as reviewed so you can later come back to it is also really nice. And to me the most powerful feature is the ability to rebase the patch directly from within Gerrit, which makes it very easy to keep patches in sync with master, unlike bugzilla patches that tend to rot quickly and usually the contributor is asked to do the rebasing.

So my advice would be, even if Gerrit feels like more work for you because you have mastered your old bugzilla patch workflow, it's worth giving it a try. With email notifications and a handy dashboard it really isn't more work to monitor and accept contributions on both channels. I really don't think Gerrit needs to be forced on projects though if they aren't seeing the benefit yet.

John

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