[vtk-developers] Gerrit Topic enhancement

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

Hi Bill,

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 12:45 PM, Bill Lorensen <bill.lorensen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I really like the topic enhancements you have made to gerrit. It makes
> it very easy to download (I always cherry pick) topics with multiple
> commits. Once it settles down, I'll be recommending it to the ITK
> developers.
>
> Would it be possible for the robot check to do try a merge against
> master? When I'm developing a patch over a period of time, especially
> a WIP, I often rebase the patch to make sure it will merge with
> master. I don't like to defer the merge check until I do a
> gerrit-merge. By then, I think it's too late and more difficult to
> resolve.
>
Gerrit already does some checking to see if a change is likely to
result in a conflict. It now creates the merge commit for you, and we
have verified that when there is a conflict it reports the error
accordingly. The rebase/cherry-pick operation is no harder after
Gerrit hit a conflict than before, and if changes are rebased it makes
it much harder to examine changes between revisions of a topic.

The conflict checks are improving with each release of Gerrit, and I
think we should defer to Gerrit where possible. If you have a linear
topic with no merges then a rebase of a conflicting topic is as simple
as,

git fetch origin
git rebase origin/master
git gerrit-push

This could then be reviewed for any new problems, and merged in the
Gerrit UI as normal.  Why do you feel it is more difficult this way?

Marcus