From: Thomas Martitz via rockbox-dev <rockbox-dev_at_cool.haxx.se>
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2017 08:04:26 +0200

Am 20.04.2017 um 14:23 schrieb Björn Stenberg via rockbox-dev:
> Hello all patient devs.
>
> As you know, we've had some site issues the last month since I upgraded gerrit. It has stopped calling any hooks and has resisted all my attempts at starting again. There is to my knowledge no way to downgrade gerrit without losing the last month of work, since the update included a database schema change.
>
> I'm thinking this might be a good time to grab the bull by the horns and do what has needed doing for quite some time: Move parts of our infrastructure away from having me as a project bottleneck.
>
> What I'm considering first is switching our development from the locally hosted Gerrit to our already up-to-date project mirror on Github. This would require a bit of effort on my part to trigger the builds from a github web hook instead of a gerrit hook, but it shouldn't be a very big deal. And at least github hooks work.
>
> I don't know how hard it is to transform gerrit changes into github pull requests. Maybe it's trivial, or maybe we decide that it's just as easy to move the relevant couple of dozen patches manually.
>
> This could be our only change, or it could be a first step to moving more parts of the rockbox project infrastructure out of the single server I'm frankly not maintaining very well onto various free public services that are now available, professionally maintained and in many cases vastly more powerful than our current setup.
>
> Discuss!
>

Github has lots of merits, for example it's pretty ubiquitous by now and
tracking forks is really nice.

BUT it's still a closed-source service, and I find the review system
really poor compared to gerrit (there are third-party services that
improve a bit, though).

For example: Because github doesn't use a change-id, force pushing after
rebase often messes up the review and makes comments go into void, but
rebase is something you want to do often during local development.

In the end I wouldn't block a move to github, I contribute to other
projects on github. More than I contribute to Rockbox these days, and I
don't expect it's getting better anytime soon. But I would prefer if we
could repair our gerrit service and migrate it to a more actively
maintained server.

Best regards.
Received on 2017-04-21