Re: Working towards a common review format for git

[Dave Borowitz <dborowitz@google.com>]

On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 9:24 AM, Dave Borowitz <dborowitz@google.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2016 at 9:08 AM, Richard Ipsum
> <richard.ipsum@codethink.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> In a prior email I mentioned in passing a library I've been working
>> on to try to reach a common format for storing review content in git:
>> perl-notedb.[1]
>>
>> I'm making reasonable progress with this but my work has uncovered
>> necessary (and trivial) modifications to Notedb, the first[2] is a
>> trivial modification to ensure the 'Status' trailer gets written
>> to the commit when a change's status changes.
>
> I would consider this a bugfix, and will respond on that review.
>
>> The second[3] is an RFC
>> where I suggest adding a 'Commit' trailer so that it is always
>> possible to reference the commit under review by its sha.
>
> I think this is probably fine but I'll have to think about it some more.
>
>> With these patches applied to gerrit it's possible for perl-notedb to parse
>> all meta content from notedb and map it to the actual git content
>> under review. However, my concern at present is that I'm already
>> operating under a fork of notedb which defeats the objective of
>> collaborating to produce a standard format, let's try to avoid[4]
>
> I hope I can assuage some of your concerns by saying that since Gerrit
> notedb is such a work in progress, literally nobody is running it in
> the wild, so even if the formats diverge temporarily I don't see it as
> being a long-term issue. But thank you for caring about it, I do
> appreciate your proactive considerations.

You know what would probably also be a good idea would be to spec out
the entire format in a standalone document. That way when Gerrit
doesn't have something implemented, it's clear that Gerrit is wrong,
not that it's trying to fork the format.

>> If the gerrit folks could let me know what I need to do to get
>> these modifications merged, or else what we need to do to achieve
>> equivalent functionality I'd really appreciate it.
>>
>> Thanks again,
>> Richard Ipsum
>>
>> [1]: https://bitbucket.org/richardipsum/perl-notedb
>> [2]: https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/#/c/73436/
>> [3]: https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/#/c/73602/
>> [4]: https://xkcd.com/927/