GitMinutes #30: Luca Milanesio on Gerrit Code Review

This is GitMinutes episode 30 where I’m talking to Luca Milanesio, a seasoned Gerrit contributor, and the co-founder of GerritForge.

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You may know Gerrit as being the code-review tool that powers some of the largest open source projects out there today, like Android, Chrome and the Eclipse foundation. It’s used by big companies like Google, Sony, Ericsson and many others. It’s a very powerful tool where you can push up your suggested changes and have them reviewed naturally, and you can also get feedback from continuous integration tools like Jenkins to make sure that your suggested changes don’t break the build. And Gerrit is the main thing we’ll talk about today.

Links:

• Luca, GitEnterprise (blog, GitHub, Twitter, Facebook)
• Use the Force, Luca (article on InfoQ)
• Learning Gerrit Code Review (Luca's book)
• GerritForge 
• GitEnterprise
• Luca’s InfoQ talk on Gerrit 
• Introducing GerritHub, Gerrit Code Review on GitHub (video)
• Continuous Integration Entwicklungs Workflow (Python, GerritHub, Jenkins) (video)
• Scaling Mercurial at Facebook (blog post)
• Scaling Source Control at Facebook (video with the same message)
• The infamous force push (mailing list discussion)

Luca's Git pro-tip:

Use your Git local repopository as your journal and your Git commits as the explicit, simple and useful phrases of it. Before pushing, do a git rebase -i to review, re-organise and give sense to your Git history.

Outline/questions (if you think this is useful, let me know):

0:00	Welcome, intro
1:14	Thanks to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this episode!
2:33	Welcome to the show, Luca.
3:29	Tell us about the force push
5:10	Tell us how you ended up where you are today
7:06	What is gitenterprise.com
8:19	Is GitEnterprise like GitHub for companies?
14:50	Lets come back to codereview later
15:23	Is GerritHub = GitEnterprise = GerritForge?
17:39	Can everyone use GerritHub for Github stuff?
18:34	Are the GitHub repositories used as the backend for Github?
23:32	Let's take a step back and look at Gerrit from the perspective of a beginner
31:23	For which teams is Gerrit the right choice?
36:09	What about teams coming directly from SVN or something else starting with Git and Gerrit at the same time?
41:40	What are Topics about?
44:53	Where are the topics managed? Where is the master record?
46:01	I definitely see the need for topics with multi repo or Jenkins jobs
49:05	Is Gerrit a good choice if you have multiple interdependent repositories then?
51:12	About Facebooks big mercurial infrastructure
51:38	Gerrit will give you the advantages that Faceboo wanted, and smaller repos
53:30	How do you review topics within Gerrit compared to traditional commits?
58:42	Are multiple interdependent changes merged in one go or one commit at a time?
59:56	We went a bit off course there, topics are very interesting :)
1:00:28	Can you talk about the community and what's going on there?
1:02:41	Oh, Spotify is also using Gerrit?
1:08:22	Traditional code review is more blame game...
1:09:54	Gerrit style review is actually lowers the barrier for daring to submitting patches..
1:15:31	Pair programming vs Code Review
1:19:05	How to learn/introduce Gerrit in a company
1:23:58	Any questions I forgot to as you? (How the force push happened)
1:25:34	Anything you'd like to promote?
1:26:57	Let people know how they can get in touch with you.
1:27:17	Tell us your favorite Git pro-tip.