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Re: [mdt-ocl.dev] Playing with gerrit
Hi Ed,

When we think that the new feature is ready, we prepare it for review by squashing the commits into a single one with a proper commit message, which we push for review. What you see in the review I've linked here (https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/13903/) is the result of such a squash.
For a single change I certainly prefer to compare the start/finish; I don't have time to study the mistakes that were made along the way. Unfortunately Adolfo's second try at a review request failed to squash correctly, so I'm a bit worried that an intelligent user is making such a mess of a trivial change. I'm not impressed by the web interface to Gerrit and apparently there is no working EGIT integration, so I had to change to Eclipse, navigate to the file to verify that the Gerrit display was wrong.

It takes a while to familiarize with the Web UI of Gerrit... and even then it isn't that good a user experience. The Mylyn integration for gerrit seems quite good, but I haven't taken the time yet to check it out (http://www.eclipse.org/reviews/).

It's 'just' a matter of better discipline to try to avoid two improvements getting tangled, which is very difficult unless you have a very fast review response, and that is counterproductive because often I like an improvement to have a little time to settle since it was often triggered by another problem, and may deserve further work.

You can leave reviews pending for a long while, we actually do for some of ours. My "initial" process for working with Gerrit was quite messy, but it did the trick :
  • checkout master
  • work as usual
  • commit (a)
  • push a for review
  • some more work
  • commit b
  • once I am satisfied with b
    • It b depends on changes introduced by a, nothing to do, push for review
    • if it does _not_ depend on a, interactive rebase to remove the dependency (just change the order so that b comes before a), push b for review.
Nothing prevents you from removing 'a' altogether from your clone since you can just cherry-pick it again from gerrit if it needs improvements. You can stop playing around with 'a' once its review has been approved and submitted on the remote. Though this worked, it was the lazy way of doing things.

A better workflow is to really start taking advantage of branches.
  • checkout master
  • create topic branch topic_a
  • work
  • commit a
  • push for review against master
  • checkout master
  • create topic branch topic_b
  • work
  • commit b
  • push for review against master
This second one is already really close to what you're doing if I understand correctly, so I thought you wouldn't have much trouble adopting gerrit :). All that you really need to take care of is to have independent commits, or to make sure that the dependencies are legitimate.
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email;internet:laurent.goubet@xxxxxxx
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