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Gerrit is nice, but to me feels a bit dated, UX-wise. Before joining Google, I used Azure DevOps and I feel that it was easier to review code over there (less j

Gerrit is nice, but to me feels a bit dated, UX-wise. Before joining Google, I used Azure DevOps and I feel that it was easier to review code over there (less jumping around the page). At first I thought it's a matter of (in)familiarity with the tool, but I still feel like I'm fighting with it after 3 years of use...

wyldfire 5y ago
I really like that with Gerrit I'm not encouraged to force-push a PR branch. There's a couple other things that are nicer on Gerrit but GitHub/GHE is great that it has markdown in comments.
- coryrc 5y ago
  Gerrit only has force push for the PR equivalent. The nice thing it has is really easy to rebase off other people's in-progress work (for GitHub you need to to fetch the other person's commit by url and hash -- I guess after writing that down it's not a huge advantage).
- zdw 5y ago
  Gerrit does support some Markdown-like formatting: Some basic markdown-like syntax is supported which renders indented lines preformatted, lines starting with "- " or "* " as list items, and lines starting with "> " as block quotes from: https://gerrit-documentation.storage.googleapis.com/Documentation/3.4.1/user-review-ui.html#reply https://gerrit-documentation.storage.googleapis.com/Document...
surajrmal 5y ago
There has been a lot of investment in Gerrit in the last few years and the UX is improving dramatically. It's still not perfect, but I've been very happy with it lately.
ahartmetz 5y ago
The Gerrit UI is just bad (confusing). I don't like the "dated" criticism for work tools because whether it works well is mostly independent of it being fashionable - cf. Steve Jobs quote "Design is how it works". Gerrit's UI is both dated and confusing, but confusing is the major thing here. For example, "+1" and "-1" meaning "I like / don't like it" and "+2" / "-2" meaning "I approve / block it". The numbers are not summed up, the names are misleading. Or the workflow of writing a comment and then publishing it. Probably makes sense when making several comments (on different blocks of code), but it's too easy to forget the publishing, especially when writing a top-level comment where there isn't anything else to publish together. Another thing I don't like about Gerrit is that they seem to play Tetris with UI elements, i.e. "wherever there's room to put it is where we put it". It's not as bad as it used to be and improving, and it looks less dated than it used to, too. There are also newish features like patch editing in the web interface. All that said, patch queues / stacks and the rebase based workflow are nice.
- bialpio 5y ago
  Definitely, "feels dated" is very subjective. The other problem ("I feel like I'm fighting with the tool", "I'm jumping all over the place to do what I want") may be related to your "UI tetris" point, and I may be unnecessarily tying it to the UI feeling "dated". ISTM that what is needed is to observe how people interact with the tool and then try to figure out how the workflow can be improved based on those observations. Or maybe I'm trying to interact with gerrit in some strange way - that's also possible. The +1 / +2 for different labels aren't that confusing to me - additionally, in Chromium I found that gerrit is very descriptive when you on-mouse-over the buttons, but IDK if it's specific to this deployment or if that aspect got improved.

wyldfire 5y ago

I really like that with Gerrit I'm not encouraged to force-push a PR branch. There's a couple other things that are nicer on Gerrit but GitHub/GHE is great that it has markdown in comments.

coryrc 5y ago
Gerrit only has force push for the PR equivalent. The nice thing it has is really easy to rebase off other people's in-progress work (for GitHub you need to to fetch the other person's commit by url and hash -- I guess after writing that down it's not a huge advantage).
zdw 5y ago
Gerrit does support some Markdown-like formatting: Some basic markdown-like syntax is supported which renders indented lines preformatted, lines starting with "- " or "* " as list items, and lines starting with "> " as block quotes from: https://gerrit-documentation.storage.googleapis.com/Documentation/3.4.1/user-review-ui.html#reply https://gerrit-documentation.storage.googleapis.com/Document...

surajrmal 5y ago

There has been a lot of investment in Gerrit in the last few years and the UX is improving dramatically. It's still not perfect, but I've been very happy with it lately.

ahartmetz 5y ago

The Gerrit UI is just bad (confusing). I don't like the "dated" criticism for work tools because whether it works well is mostly independent of it being fashionable - cf. Steve Jobs quote "Design is how it works". Gerrit's UI is both dated and confusing, but confusing is the major thing here. For example, "+1" and "-1" meaning "I like / don't like it" and "+2" / "-2" meaning "I approve / block it". The numbers are not summed up, the names are misleading. Or the workflow of writing a comment and then publishing it. Probably makes sense when making several comments (on different blocks of code), but it's too easy to forget the publishing, especially when writing a top-level comment where there isn't anything else to publish together. Another thing I don't like about Gerrit is that they seem to play Tetris with UI elements, i.e. "wherever there's room to put it is where we put it". It's not as bad as it used to be and improving, and it looks less dated than it used to, too. There are also newish features like patch editing in the web interface. All that said, patch queues / stacks and the rebase based workflow are nice.

bialpio 5y ago
Definitely, "feels dated" is very subjective. The other problem ("I feel like I'm fighting with the tool", "I'm jumping all over the place to do what I want") may be related to your "UI tetris" point, and I may be unnecessarily tying it to the UI feeling "dated". ISTM that what is needed is to observe how people interact with the tool and then try to figure out how the workflow can be improved based on those observations. Or maybe I'm trying to interact with gerrit in some strange way - that's also possible. The +1 / +2 for different labels aren't that confusing to me - additionally, in Chromium I found that gerrit is very descriptive when you on-mouse-over the buttons, but IDK if it's specific to this deployment or if that aspect got improved.