[U-Boot] u-boot gerrit server

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Tom,

In message <20131116013913.GN420 at bill-the-cat> you wrote:
> 
> > Here is my key problem.  I cannot even figure out what to do with this
> > page.  I cannot display it in a format I am used to, not can I
> > process it in a way I'm used to.  I'm totally lost with that.
>
> Scroll down to patch set 1, click on unified and you get:
> https://u-boot-review.googlesource.com/#/c/1221/1/common/cmd_nvedit.c,unified
> and that's a "fancy" unified diff (tabs denoted, line numbers added,
> highlighting on the changes within a line).  Some of that is pretty
> useful, but I would like to know if you can tweak that once logged in.

Well, some might find this cool, but for me it is utterly useless.
I cannot do anything with this format.  I started working in UNIX
environments about 30 years ago, and what I need is a text file.
I'm using nmh / exmh as MUA< so each message on the mailing list is a
separate text file.  This is what I need, as I can _work_ with the
data, using standard tools.

I can grep for basic information (like for other patches that touch
similar code), I can run the message through checkpatch or other
scripts, I can check if it applies to the source tree. I can open it
in an editor and use standard tools like ctags etc. to get additional
nformation about the source context, related files, definitions in
header files and all that.

With Gerrit, I can do none of this.  I am dumbed and blindfolded and
restricted to tactile senses.

Yes, I guess I can download the patch and process it then, and then
switch tools again to type a comment in an unwieldy and unchangable
environment.

Yes, gerrit provides search tools (see [1]) - but compare this against
plain old grep and the rest of the text processing tools in Unix...

To me, gerrit appears to be the type of tool used in Big
Organizations style of work - capable of organizing the work and
enforcing adherence to certain procedures and processes for big teams
of engineers.  Gerrit describes itself as "web based code review and
project management for Git based projects".  I think this is correct.

Maybe I'm wrong, but my understanding was that we were not primarily
interested in introducing better project management tools, but in
reducing the work load on the maintainers, making our work more
efficient.

I have to admit that I have zero practical experience with gerrit
(meaning I have never used it as core tool in any real-life project,
and did only very limited and very basic testing - and the learning
curve apears to be long and arduous!), but from what I've seen so far
I see feel that indeed helps to better organize the work, but at the
cose of considerable restrictions to in the tooling and interfaces,
resulting (at least for me) in lower efficiency.

I've tried to find discussions of using gerrit in Linux kernel
development.  I found little - see [2].  I find statements like
"git needs an friendly UI, web based is the future." not exactly
convincing.  There were a number discussions at the last Linux
Conference / ELCE about maintainers' efficiency and scaling problems
with the always growing work load.  There are so many really excellent
engineers in the Linxu project - but apparently none of them uses (or
talks about considering to use) gerrit.  Is it just lack of
information, or intuition, fear of changing the well-known processes -
or do they have good reasons?


I see a lot of open questions here...


[1] https://review.openstack.org/Documentation/user-search.html
[2] http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1003.0/00687.html

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
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Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
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