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On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Wolfgang Denk wd@denx.de wrote:
Dear Wolfgang,
[snip..] 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.
Having worked with email based reviews and with gerrit, I would say that gerrit has overwhelming advantage when it comes to reviewing complex changes, especially when multiple patch versions are required due to review comments.
These are the major advantages IMO:
- the side-by side display of the changes makes it easier to understand what is going on - the entire source file is at the reviewer's disposal if he wants to see a larger context - it is very easy to see what changed between patch versions - it is easy to pull entire patch series into a local tree if one wants to try a change
So, if one wants to optimize for complex cases, gerrit is advantageous (again, IMO, of course). But I totally understand your concerns wrt the need to change the work flow and the need to have an account to post even a small patch (I am not sure, but there might be a way around this).
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...
Gerrit, of course, is an open source project (quite big and complicated, but still), they are open to suggestions and would definitely consider patches, but this is probably a very long shot, as Java, Prologue and JavaScript require a very different skill and experience set than the typical u-boot developer possesses :)
Of course it is up to you to decide, I am sure the status quo will keep working for another (maybe long) while.
regards, --vb
[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
-- DENX Software Engineering GmbH, MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd@denx.de Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke