Thank you to CollabNet Inc. for the opportunity to showcase Gerrit Code Review “in action” to a broad audience of over 120 attendees from all over the world ! During the last Session we have seen how to create your first Code-Review with Gerrit and getting automatic validation through Jenkins Gerrit-Trigger-Plugin.

NOTE: Unfortunately the session was broken in the middle of Q&A due to a technical issue with the Webinar conference tool: we invite you to comment on this blog by posting your additional questions, we will be happy to answer all of them.

GerritForge LLP is proud partner of CollabNet Inc. and invites you to replay the three webinars of the series:

1. Workflows, Branching & Merging (View on demand)
   Learn the basic concepts of Git and Gerrit and see explore the power of merging and applying code from different branches thanks to recursive merge, rebase and cherry-pick.
2. Peer Programming & Code Reviews (View on demand)
   See how Gerrit Code Review can enforce full code collaboration and collective ownership, similarly to peer programming you can achieve faster and better code delivery. Learn how to integrate Jenkins CI into the development process and have automatic validation to feedback into your code review workflow.
3. Hands-On Lab with Gerrit & Jenkins (View on demand)
   Step-by-step hands-on with Gerrit to learn how to move your first steps with Code Review: contribute your change, trigger your Jenkins CI validation and learn how to understand the feedbacks and amend your code for achieving a successful merged change into the main branch. Learn how to manage multiple reviews when the code evolves.

See below the log of Question and Answers of the Gerrit Code Review webinar, brought to you by GerritForge LLP in order to give you the opportunity of getting more insight on Gerrit and trigger more discussion and feedback on Code Review.

Gerrit Code Revew – Q&A

Q: Is refs/for/master branch created for each user by gerrit?.
A: Gerrit automatically manages the “refs/for/<target-branch>” logical branches (not real branches on Git Server). Whenever a commit is pushed to a “refs/for/<target-branch>”, Gerrit capture the commit and creates (or add to) a Change for review  for the target-branch indicated. Different commits pushed by different users create different changes.

Q: would you reccommend using -SNAPSHOT in the POM’s version during development phase, if so when to remove it for prod releases?
A: Yes, it is a common and good practice to use -SNAPSHOT suffix for labelling maven artifacts that are still in development. On stable branches however it is recommended to edit (possibly via scripting) all the pom.xml and use a final version number, without the -SNAPSHOT suffix.

Q: Is it possible to share the job configurations from Jenkins
A: Jenkins has been integrated with Gerrit using the Git Plugin Ver. 1.1.18 plus Gerrit Trigger Plugin Ver. 2.5.2; Gerrit configuration can be found in the global Jenkins configuration screen:

Gerrit Trigger contains the SSH details to connect from Jenkins to Gerrit Server (gitent and /home/gitent are the CollabNet TeamForge 6.2 user and user home directory under which Jenkins CI is running on):

Jenkins Job configuration / Git settings, needed to instruct the Git plugin on the ref-spec and branch to clone when a new Gerrit Change is pushed:

Git plugin advanced options are specified:
1) wipe out the workspace before build (as changes could be taken from completely different branches every time)
2) Trigger a build from Gerrit events / changes.

Gerrit Trigger settings on the Jenkins Job:

Q: Is ammend command part of git? Can it be done via eclipse or some other IDE?
A: The “–amend” option allows to edit the last commit objects in HEAD. EGit (Eclipse Git plugin) allows to amend using  a specific icon on the top-right corner of the commit window.

Q: what code deployment tools are recommended with GIT/Gerrit/Jenkin teamforge solution
A: CollabNet recommends UC4 (See: http://www.collab.net/deploy). Please refer to a CollabNet tech sales representative for more information.

Thank you again for your attendance to all the three webinars and stay tuned as new Webinars and training material on Git and Gerrit is coming soon !