Antoine Musso wrote:
MZ, Do you even have a labs account? Your continuous rants are far from being constructive and makes everyone lose their time.
Nope. I looked at getting one once or twice, but the process seemed too bureaucratic and I ended up walking away. I imagine I'll make one once self-registration becomes possible.
I don't think it's fair to say that my posts have been unconstructive. I've tried to present actual problems (such as the lack of an authors list) that inhibit being able to effectively use Gerrit. I've also documented my experiences with Gerrit's UI, which to me is completely unintuitive (for example, finding the code inspection links beneath "tree" or "gitweb" took me weeks). In May, I tried to create a page about Gerrit's problems: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Gerrit/Problems. I don't know Java or Prolog, otherwise I might have offered to help improve Gerrit directly.
Instead, all I can do is share my experiences with the tool in a conversation about it and alternatives. You sound frustrated in your post, hashar, but I don't think you're frustrated with me. If I had to use Gerrit every day (in its current form), I'd be frustrated as well. Though in its defense, once you learn where the secret links and menus and buttons are, most of the needed functionality is there.
Ryan Lane wrote:
So, you found something you'd like added to the software: a user list. Have you entered a bug? The problem you are encountering is that you are used to a piece of software, and the new software doesn't have the exact same feature set. This happens, and will happen with any new tool if we switch, too.
There's an open bug for this:
Thank you for the bug link.
Note that the bug mentions a number of ways you can get a user list outside of Gerrit. I think it would be nice to have Gerrit itself have the user list interface. With extension support in Gerrit 2.5, we may be able to implement it ourselves.
It feels a bit like buying a car that has no steering wheel. I didn't really want to overrun our bug tracker with Gerrit bugs, but I can certainly file a few against it.
I'm not trying to be an asshole, but I really don't understand how such a basic feature is missing (which is what I meant by "how does anyone use Gerrit?"). There's a dashboard feature that accepts user IDs to view a particular user's contributions to Gerrit, but without an index (or some other way to match IDs to usernames), I really have no idea how you're supposed to be able to look at a particular user's contributions.
I think a lot of people are frustrated by the fact that the types of problems being encountered in Gerrit would typically be trivial to fix (CSS precedence, for example). The fact that they're not runs against a lot of core Wikimedia principles.
As mentioned at least twice already in these threads, this is simply not true. It's possible to fix the CSS right now (and if you look at OpenStack's Gerrit, you'd notice they've already done so).
I know about OpenStack's CSS customizations. With regard to Wikimedia's Gerrit installation and CSS, I'll believe it when I see it. :-)
Yes, self-registration would be fantastic. :-) I commented on this bug last Saturday: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37628 ("Creating a Git/Gerrit/Labs account requires human intervention"). I realize that you and the other ops folks are busy, but if someone could at least explain the current process, it would give volunteer developers a fighting chance of helping out. Not having the faintest idea how the current account creation process works, I can't help or find anyone to help make it better.
I could have sworn there was another bug open for this that documented what needed to get done. I just spent a few minutes updating the bug. It's likely a fairly small OpenStackManager change, and a labsconsole configuration change. As mentioned it's on my list after Labs upgrades. If someone else wants to tackle it first, I'd love that.
Great, thank you for updating the bug.
And thank you both for your thoughtful replies. I appreciate them. :-)
For what it's worth, I think Ryan makes a compelling case for sticking with Gerrit (and I'm still not convinced that another switch would do more good than harm). I'm still deeply worried about the ability to use and improve Gerrit. It would be horribly painful to see all of the work switching from SVN to Git (a large portion of which was intended to allow easy code contributions) go to waste because this particular Git front-end has scared everyone away.
MZMcBride