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My company uses a self-hosted Gerrit instance. A bit of a learning curve, but the code review experience is SO much better than PRs (one commit == one unit of r

by lima 4y ago

My company uses a self-hosted Gerrit instance. A bit of a learning curve, but the code review experience is SO much better than PRs (one commit == one unit of review, clean intra-diffs between different revisions of a patch, stacking of reviews simply by having multiple commits on a branch, UI is very snappy and responsive...). Self-hosting Gerrit is easy[1] because all its internal state is fully transactional, including reviews and configs, and is simply stored as normal Git commits inside the Git repos on the filesystem. In fact, our instance had much better uptime over the past year than GitHub despite being migrated to another server once! [1]: ... unless you need a complex high availability setup or replicas. But 99% of projects are fine with just a single instance and backups.

skywhopper 4y ago
Gerrit looks ugly, and the admin story is a nightmare, but it's such a better experience for code reviews (plus you can actually enforce code review in a way Github cannot). I can't stand dealing with Github for code review after spending a few years using Gerrit.
- codeapprove 4y ago
  (shameless plug alert) If you're looking for a drop-in improvement to GitHub's code review experience, you may be interested in CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com https://codeapprove.com). It's got a lot of the things that make Gerrit appealing, but with less of a drastic workflow shift (still branch-based PRs) and a much nicer UI.
  - lima 4y ago
    Haven't tried this one but Reviewable and Graphite. They're all very nice and yours looks nice also. The problem with all these third party SaaS-es on top of GitHub: - You have to trust a random (no offense meant!) SaaS company with full access to your repositories, and to not disappear in a year or two. - GitHub API rate limits end up causing issues sooner or later. For instance, Reviewable would randomly break and ask you to add more admin users so it could load balance API requests across multiple accounts! - Likewise, you are still forced into the PR model and things that are trivial in Gerrit, like stacked diffs, are still hard. spr helps[1], but at that point you are piling workarounds on top of workarounds, might as well use a tool that supports the workflow natively... - It gets messy unless 100% of the team is using it because then you have to somehow sync comments and approvals back and forth... And getting 100% of the team to use it isn't much easier than convincing them to use Gerrit, with all of the downsides. [1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr https://github.com/ejoffe/spr
    - codeapprove 4y ago
      All great points, and I appreciate them because I think CodeApprove's marketing materials should address them more head on. The first two (trust with repos and GitHub API rate limits) don't really apply to CodeApprove in the same way they do to Reviewable. Because we're using GitHub's newer "apps" system and not OAuth, we only have very limited scopes (can't write code, etc.) and API rate limits go up as we get more users. Your points about stacked diffs and PR adoption stand!

by lima 4y ago

skywhopper 4y ago

Gerrit looks ugly, and the admin story is a nightmare, but it's such a better experience for code reviews (plus you can actually enforce code review in a way Github cannot). I can't stand dealing with Github for code review after spending a few years using Gerrit.

codeapprove 4y ago
(shameless plug alert) If you're looking for a drop-in improvement to GitHub's code review experience, you may be interested in CodeApprove (https://codeapprove.com https://codeapprove.com). It's got a lot of the things that make Gerrit appealing, but with less of a drastic workflow shift (still branch-based PRs) and a much nicer UI.
- lima 4y ago
  Haven't tried this one but Reviewable and Graphite. They're all very nice and yours looks nice also. The problem with all these third party SaaS-es on top of GitHub: - You have to trust a random (no offense meant!) SaaS company with full access to your repositories, and to not disappear in a year or two. - GitHub API rate limits end up causing issues sooner or later. For instance, Reviewable would randomly break and ask you to add more admin users so it could load balance API requests across multiple accounts! - Likewise, you are still forced into the PR model and things that are trivial in Gerrit, like stacked diffs, are still hard. spr helps[1], but at that point you are piling workarounds on top of workarounds, might as well use a tool that supports the workflow natively... - It gets messy unless 100% of the team is using it because then you have to somehow sync comments and approvals back and forth... And getting 100% of the team to use it isn't much easier than convincing them to use Gerrit, with all of the downsides. [1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr https://github.com/ejoffe/spr
  - codeapprove 4y ago
    All great points, and I appreciate them because I think CodeApprove's marketing materials should address them more head on. The first two (trust with repos and GitHub API rate limits) don't really apply to CodeApprove in the same way they do to Reviewable. Because we're using GitHub's newer "apps" system and not OAuth, we only have very limited scopes (can't write code, etc.) and API rate limits go up as we get more users. Your points about stacked diffs and PR adoption stand!