Ryan Lane wrote:
You've already admitted that you don't use Gerrit, so do you have a really large stake in this?
Before it was replaced, I used MediaWiki's CodeReview quite a bit. Like most people, I think I would use Gerrit more if it weren't so awful. Just tonight I was trying to get an index of Gerrit contributors (owners, I guess the term is). Something similar to this list from the SVN system: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/author. Apparently Gerrit doesn't have a feature to list authors like this. All I wanted to do was find a particular user and look at his contributions. And, as usual, it took twenty minutes instead of ten seconds because Gerrit sucks.
How does anyone use Gerrit?
Every release *has* been much better and the releases are often, and that's a great thing. It's not a corporate justification, it's reality. Having a really responsive and active upstream is awesome.
You'll have to forgive me, but the only way I can read this is, "the car now breaks down two minutes into the journey; it used to break down a minute in!"
I know people complain about Gerrit a lot, but I personally find it much better than our previous toolset.
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.
We can just give people accounts now, and we eventually allow people to self-register as well. In fact, this is one of my top goals after upgrading openstack and adding a new Labs zone in eqiad.
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.
MZMcBride