Open Stack

On 3/17/14, 12:59 PM, "Thierry Carrez" <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:
>Being fully aware of the irony, I'll play the devil's advocate:
>
>Could you detail why improving Gerrit is not an option ? At first glance
>its development seemed to be open enough, and it didn't appear
>fundamentally wrong (just needing a few incremental changes).

Thierry,

I am glad that you asked this question as it was the first thing that I
looked at. As most know, Gerrit is a monolithic Java application. For a
community of python developers (many of which know Java), it is not the
best code base to work with. It has a steep learning curve for new
developers to make changes to the software as a whole. This is the first
issue I see with modifying Gerrit directly.

The second is the project itself. Yes, it moves forward at a good pace,
but they take a majority of guidance from 2 open source projects (Android
and wikimedia). This tends to leave issues from smaller projects, or
parties, left in limbo or voted against as they do not align with the
goals they see fit along with not offering a recourse for discussion of
it. 

The third problem I see it is how the system is extended itself, this is
through triggers and plugins. They get the job done, but leave much wanted
in easy of adding to the system. The first issue I see is with triggers,
you either have to script or write an application to connect into Gerrit
and poll for triggers on a review. Second is with plugins being pure java
code with a strict format of plugins that requires a developer to have a
fully working Gerrit developer install along with a working knowledge of
the structure of the plugin API in order to build a new plugin. (Not
difficult, but time consuming for developers that have never worked with
the Gerrit code base).

I feel that our proposal of a complete replacement written in python and
using parts of oslo will lead to a cleaner and more maintainable tool for
OpenStack in the long run. Using Oslo and styling standards of the
OpenStack project will allow a much greater audience of developers to
extend the system which I feel in turn will lead to a much better tool.

Also starting a new tool like this at this time gives us one more large
opportunity. This is being able to share code and integrate with
Storyboard from an early stage while Storyboard is still in development.
Currently integration of launchpad and Gerrit are at a very minimal
amount. With the ongoing development of Storyboard we are in a unique
place to be able to share style guidelines and UI elements leading to a
set of tools that will have a much more cohesive feel.

-Philip Schwartz