Open Stack

On 25/01/18 19:08, James E. Blair wrote:
> Mathieu Gagné <mgagne at calavera.ca> writes:
> 
>> On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 3:55 PM, Ben Nemec <openstack at nemebean.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm curious what this means as far as best practices for inter-patch
>>> references.  In the past my understanding was the the change id was
>>> preferred, both because if gerrit changed its URL format the change id links
>>> would be updated appropriately, and also because change ids can be looked up
>>> offline in git commit messages.  Would that still be the case for everything
>>> except depends-on now?
> 
> Yes, that's a down-side of URLs.  I personally think it's fine to keep
> using change-ids for anything other than Depends-On, though in many of
> those cases the commit sha may work as well.
> 
>> That's my concern too. Also AFAIK, Change-Id is branch agnostic. This
>> means you can more easily cherry-pick between branches without having
>> to change the URL to match the new branch for your dependencies.
> 
> Yes, there is a positive and negative aspect to this issue.
> 
> On the one hand, for those times where it was convenient to say "depend
> on this change in all its forms across all branches of all projects",
> one must now add a URL for each.
> 
> On the other hand, with URLs, it is now possible to indicate that a
> change specifically depends on another change targeted to one branch, or
> targeted to several branches.  Simply list each URL (or don't) as
> appropriate.  That wasn't possible before -- it wall all or none.

Yeah, it's definitely nice to have that flexibility. e.g. here is a 
patch that wouldn't merge for 3 months because the thing it was 
dependent on also got proposed as a backport:

https://review.openstack.org/#/c/514761/1

 From an OpenStack perspective, it would be nice if a Gerrit ID implied 
a change from the same Gerrit instance as the current repo and the same 
branch as the current patch if it exists (otherwise any branch), and we 
could optionally use a URL instead to select a particular change.

It's not obvious to me that that'd be the wrong thing for a tool that 
works across multiple Gerrit instances and/or other backends either, but 
I'm sure y'all have thought about it in more depth than I have.

cheers,
Zane.