- It's a Ruby on Rails codebase with lots of gem dependencies and a
reputation for being hard to install (haven't tried it).
I can vouch for this in a limited fashion, I spent around an hour one day trying to get it working, and gave up. This has been my experience with 90% of Ruby projects, however, so I wouldn't judge Gitorious for this. I had similar trouble with Barkeep. I was only barely able to get Diaspora running.
- Like GitHub/Gerrit, it's not just a code review tool, but also
manages repositories.
The advantage over Gerrit is that Gitorious also has project wikis (however useful that is over mw.org), and the disadvantage behind GitHub is that it doesn't have an issue tracker (though bz.wm.org should suffice as always).
- Unlike GitHub/Gerrit, it has no easy way to integrate merge requests
-- developers have to do so manually using git commands (see the "how to apply this merge request" box in the page above). The process seems particularly cumbersome for small patchsets, of which we get a lot.
This is possibly the most troublesome thing about it all--it would require manual rebase/merge before being able to accept a patch. That would certainly be a blocker, I'd say, but it might be possible to port the auto-merge and the revered "rebase button" from Gerrit over to Gitorious. Maybe a bit of effort, but it could be worth it.
[We could d]rink the kool-aid and join the wonderful semi-open world of GitHub, with all the risks and benefits it entails.
This is quite a nasty flavor of Kool-Aid, I'd say--but having more contributors, accomplished by whatever means, might be worth it. If there is a free alternative, and we are able to live with it (be it Gerrit, Barkeep, Phabricator, or whatever else), that seems like the better option to me right now.
Just a couple of pennies,