Gerrit but not gerrit

We like code reviews. Well, at least officially we all like code reviews. Or anyway they are mandatory.

We evaluated a bunch of possible review tools at some point (rietveld, Review Board and gerrit). We would have been happy with rietveld from a user's point of view but we didn't want to ship our source code to AppEngine (and the gae2django project that would allow it to be run on our own server wasn't very mature then). Out of Review Board and gerrit we preferred gerrit.

We liked the gerrit UI and tools (ssh auth and commands over ssh with JSON output are fabulous) but we really didn't like the gerrit workflow.

Gerrit wants to run your main repository and handle the merges into it. The reviewable changes have to be single commits, not branches, so you basically need to rebase your branches for review and merge. (I can understand that, it's kind of nice to review commits as units of change).

How we have been working is that intermediate results are regularly pulled between people and developers are attached to their intermediate commits in their feature branches.

So we use gerrit without the workflow. This comes in two parts: synthetic review commits and merging outside gerrit.

Synthetic review commits

The commits we push to gerrit are created by doing something like:

branch=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)

git fetch origin
git checkout -b gerrit-review origin/master
git merge --squash $branch
git commit -a
... edit commit message ...
git push gerrit HEAD:refs/for/master/$USER-$branch

(with error checking, checking for an existing review request and re-using the Change-ID, some related magic in the git hooks etc.)

Merging outside gerrit

Instead of pushing Submit on the gerrit review request, our merge master pulls the original branch that was used to create the review request (actually, we inject a field into the review request with the commit hash), merges that into a working copy, runs merge tests and pushes to our regular shared repository. There's a post-receive hook in that repo that force-pushes onto the gerrit repository and all is well.