Re: Updated Sourceware infrastructure plans

Ian Lance Taylor
2024-05-03T03:00:48Z

Pedro Alves via Overseers <overseers@sourceware.org> writes:

> When GDB upstream tried to use gerrit, I found it basically impossible to
> follow development, given the volume... The great thing with email is the
> threading of discussions. A discussion can fork into its own subthread, and any
> sane email client will display the discussion tree. Email archives also let
> you follow the discussion subthreads. That is great for archaeology too.
> With Gerrit that was basically lost, everything is super flat. And
> then following
> development via the gerrit instance website alone is just basically
> impossible too.
> I mean, gerrit is great to track your own patches, and for the actual review
> and diffing between versions. But for a maintainer who wants to stay
> on top of a
> project, then it's severely lacking, IME and IMO.

My experience is the exact opposite. As I'm sure you know, Gerritt
supports specific comments on a code review, and discussions on those
comments are tracked separately. For a complex patch, or series of
patches, you don't get lost in lots of separate discussions, as Gerritt
tracks them all for you separately.

But it's true that to use that effectively you have to look at the web
interface. The comments are available via git commands, but not in a
directly usable format.

Ian