On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 04:06:37PM -0700, Roan Kattouw wrote:
On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 2:20 PM, Marcin Cieslak saper@saper.info wrote:
As seen on IRC:
https://github.com/ooyala/barkeep/wiki/Comparing-Barkeep-to-other-code-revie...
The most prominent feature of Barkeep mentioned on this page is that it was built for a post-commit review workflow. Given that the reason we moved MediaWiki to git was basically so that we could move *away* from post-commit review, I don't think using Barkeep as-is would work.
Well, in the ops puppet repo though, we very often +2 commits ourselves and push them, instead of waiting for someone else to review/approve them. You could argue that it's our workflow that it's wrong, but I just think the needs for infrastructure-as-code might be different from the needs code development has.
It's like asking for pre-execution reviews of whatever you type in a shell prompt and we can all agree that's just crazy :) In a perfect world we'd stage every change in VMs where we'd do local puppet commits without reviews; then push those tested changesets into the pre-commit review system to get into production. But we're very far from that and being perfectionists just hurts us more on our daily work.
Having a proper post-commit review workflow would be much better than hacking around the system and reviewing commits ourselves. It'd also allow us to actually have post-commit reviews, something that rarely happens right now. At least I'd do that, while currently it's a PITA to do so.
Then again, from watching the demo video (see getbarkeep.org) it looks like their UI is a lot better than Gerrit's, and I like features like saved searches and most-commented-on-commits dashboards. Integrating Barkeep or the UI/UX ideas from it with Gerrit (or vice versa -- integrating Gerrit's pre-commit review workflow support with Barkeep -- but I think that would be harder) would be cool but I have no concrete ideas as to how it could be done right now.
Barkeep claims to work with both post- and pre-commit workflows, although the details elude me.
The UI is much *much* nicer than Gerrit's. They also have a demo website, which is a pleasure to work with IMHO.
They also claim to have useful, relevant and configurable e-mail notifications too, in contrast to Gerrit's which are basically useless. Maybe I'm too much of a relic to prefer reading commit diffs in my mail client, rather than fancy web interfaces :)
All in all, I like it very much but I don't have a broad knowledge of how people use Gerrit right now and therefore I can't form an opinion on whether it's suitable for us.
At least there's some competition in the space and other people having the same problems as (at least) I do, that's good :)
Regards, Faidon