On 17 November 2013 20:31, Wolfgang Denk wd@denx.de wrote:
Dear Tom,
In message 20131116013913.GN420@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,unifie... 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.
You need not download the patches one by one. You can fetch the gerrit branches into a git repo which makes them into text files you can work with - almost.
Unfortunately, git stores some data in packages and generally does not present the data in reasonable form.
This can be fixed - I can imagine something like fuse filesystem that presents pretty much what gitweb does, except in a usable form. Unfortunately, I know no such solution that can be readily used.
I find the inability to look at multiple branches without checking out multiple copies of a repository very limiting when working in git.
Thanks
Michal