Comment by bjackman

8 days ago

Is there a good code review tool out there? The best one I've used is Gerrit, at least it has a sensible design in principle. Aside from that I've only used GitHub and Gitlab which both seem like toys to me. (And mailing lists, lol).

But the implementation of Gerrit seems rather unloved, it just seems to get the minimal maintenance to keep Go/Android chooching along, and nothing more.

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bjackman

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lima  7 days ago

> But the implementation of Gerrit seems rather unloved

There are lots of people who are very fond of Gerrit, and if anything, upstream development has picked up recently. Google has an increasing amount of production code that lives outside of their monorepo, and all of those teams use Gerrit. They have a few internal plugins, but most improvements are released as part of the upstream project.

My company has been using it for years, it's a big and sustained productivity win once everyone is past the learning curve.

Gerritforge[0] offers commercial support and runs a very stable public instance, GerritHub. I'm not affiliated with them and not a customer, but I talk to them a lot on the Gerrit Discord server and they're awesome.

[0]: https://www.gerritforge.com/

seabrookmx  8 days ago

My old job used Gerrit, and new job uses Gitlab. I really miss the information density and workflow of Gerrit. We enforce fast forward merges and squashing for MR's anyways, so we just have an awkward version of what Gerrit does by default.

Gitlab CI is good but we use local (k8s-hosted) runners so I have to imagine there's a bunch of options that provide a similar experience.

  • bjackman  7 days ago

    You can't "stack" MRs in Gitlab though right? So if you're merging a complex feature you just have one huge mega commit?

    • techcode  7 days ago

      What do you mean by "stack" MRs?

      Just like with plain git - in GitLab you can merge a branch that has multiple separate commits in it. And you can also merge (e.g. topical/feature) branches into one branch - and then merge that "combined" branch into main/master.

      Though most teams/project prefer you don't stretch that route to the extreme - simply because it's PITA to maintain/sync several branches for a long period of time, resolving merge conflicts between branches that have been separate for a long time isn't fun, and people don't like to review huge diffs.

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maccard  8 days ago

We use perforce in work, and we use p4 swarm. It’s unremarkable, hasn’t changed in a decade and just works. Best part of perforce, by far

jamesfinlayson  7 days ago

I miss Gerrit - it was the first code review tool I used at work. Using GitHub and GitLab as subsequent jobs hasn't been fun.