Using gerrit or github for review?

[Simon Glass]

Hi Pratyush,

On Fri, 24 Jul 2020 at 07:30, Pratyush Yadav <p.yadav at ti.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm a bit late to this discussion, but I'll drop my $0.02 anyway.
>
> On 13/07/20 02:06PM, Simon Glass wrote:
> > Hi Heinrich,
> >
> > On Mon, 13 Jul 2020 at 13:36, Heinrich Schuchardt <xypron.glpk at gmx.de> wrote:
> > >
> > > On 13.07.20 20:25, Simon Glass wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > At present U-Boot uses the mailing list for patch review. What do
> > >
> > > Currently we are using Patchwork to keep track of the review process:
> > >
> > > https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/uboot/list/
> > >
> > > > people think about trying out geritt or github for this? I'd be
> > > > willing to do a trial with the -dm mailing list.
> > > >
> > > > My idea is that patman would email out the patches and also upload
> > > > them to one of these systems. With geritt, emails are sent every time
> > > > there is a review, but for github I'm not sure.
> > >
> > > Do we need an new tool? Managing reviews it supported by Gitlab.
> > >
> > > There is no need for patman in a process with any of the mentioned
> > > tools. Gitlab, Gerrit, and Github send out mails to reviewers.
> > >
> > > The work flow with Gitlab and Gerrit that I have seen relied on a role
> > > concept where only specific users of the system are reviewers. - Our
> > > current process allows anybody to review. This is what I would like to keep.
> > >
> > > Simon, could you, please, explain why you want to change the current
> > > process.
> >
> > I have used various tools and I'm wondering whether having another
> > option might have some benefits in terms of productivity, automation
> > and accessibility. Just as one example, if people pushed patches to
> > github / gitlab then we could 1) check out the branch and try it, 2)
> > have test automation attached, 3) use a UI for review.
> >
> > So that is the purpose of my email.
>
> You might want to look into GitGitGadget (GGG in short) [0][1]. GGG lets
> you open GitHub Pull Requests and it will convert them to patch form and
> send them to the Git mailing list. It works pretty well for the most
> part (though I haven't ever used personally. Just observed other people
> using it a lot). It automatically adds version number to patches, and
> even CCs the subsystem maintainers automatically (as of now there are
> only two, but it shouldn't be difficult to extend it to use
> get_maintainer.pl). It also watches for replies on the email thread and
> shows them in comments to the Pull Request. It also runs CI build and
> tests for each PR.
>
> One major limitation of the tool is that while you can read replies to
> the email thread, you can't send replies. You'd still need a plain text
> email client to do that. I attempted to solve this problem once but I
> didn't make much progress partly due to lack of time and partly due lack
> of TypeScript and Azure experience. But I think it can be done.
>
> I think it can help bridge the gap between the mailing list workflow and
> the GitHub workflow. If anyone is interested, they can try porting it to
> work with the U-Boot mailing list.

Thanks for the info. Certainly it would be good to integrate email and
a web-based review interface. Sending out emails is easy but parsing
them is less so (I added something very basic in patman for this).

Given that we currently use gitlab I think it would be good to do an
email integration with that. But it doesn't seem to have anything
connected to code review at present [2] and the same with gerrit [3]
which has lacked this features for years and years, so I'm guessing it
must be hard.

For gitlab we might be able to write a separate tool that uses the API
to email out reviews and attach incoming reviews to the gitlab code.

But another option is to allow code review in gitlab on a repo and see
how things go.

Regards,
Simon

[2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/incoming_email.html
[3] https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/intro-user.html

>
> [0] https://github.com/gitgitgadget/gitgitgadget
> [1] https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git
>
> --
> Regards,
> Pratyush Yadav
> Texas Instruments India