[webkit-dev] to reitveld or not to reitveld

[Mark Rowe]

On 2009-06-05, at 22:50, Peter Kasting wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 9:13 PM, Darren VanBuren  
> <onekopaka at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree that using RPC is inefficient, and that we don't want to  
> make the review process any more of a pain. We could also try  
> writing our own code review software specifically designed to work  
> with Bugzilla, so that we could run directly in the Bugzilla  
> environment, and we could modify and retrieve bugs without throwing  
> stuff around RPC channels, just by running some calls in the  
> Bugzilla modules.
>
> FWIW, in Chromium land we do all the patches *solely* on Rietveld,  
> and never touch the bug tracker at all with them.  We have tools  
> that auto-update bugs when patches are checked in and can provide  
> handy links back and forth between the tools, and that's enough.   
> I'm not a WebKit reviewer but I was a Mozilla reviewer, which also  
> does things on Bugzilla, and I don't miss the ability to post a  
> patch on a bug at all.  There is literally nothing in that workflow  
> that helps me review/land patches more easily, and it's still just  
> as easy to backtrack after the fact and find what got reviewed/ 
> landed starting from a bug. So if people who wanted to use Rietveld  
> to do code review didn't have obvious ways to attach those patches  
> to Bugzilla bugs, I'm not sure it would be a big stumbling block.

I'm a fan of simplicity, and of having one obvious way to do  
something.  Having two different ways to put a patch up for review is  
at odds with this, so it's not a solution that I would be happy with.   
Dropping our existing practice of using Bugzilla for patch reviews is  
one way of addressing this.  Folding the more useful features of  
Rietveld in to Bugzilla to improve Bugzilla-based patch reviews is  
another.  We all seem to be in agreement that the tools involved with  
reviewing a patch have room for improvement, but I've not seen a  
compelling reason why the former is a better way forward.

> (Right now it's about 10x easier for me to get a Chromium patch  
> reviewed than a WebKit one just because a single shell command can  
> create a Rietveld issue with my patch and set the description up for  
> me.)

This something of a non-sequiter, since it is trivial to create a  
script to do the same with Bugzilla.  I've heard mentions of a git- 
send-bugzilla script that does most of this already, and I'm sure it  
could easily be adapted for those preferring SVN.

- Mark

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