It has been a very long journey, from the initial adoption of PolyGerrit at GerritHub to the epic moment where Gerrit historic GWT was dropped with the Gerrit v3.0 last month.

GerritHub.io has always been aligned with the latest and greatest of Gerrit Code Review and thus the moment has come for us to upgrade to v3.0 and drop forever the GWT UI.

PolyGerrit vs. GWT adoption

The PolyGerrit UX was pretty much experimental until the beginning of 2018: the features were incomplete and people needed to go back to the old GWT UI for many of the basic use-cases.

However, things started to change radically in April 2018 when GerritHub.io adopted Gerrit v2.15 which had a 100% functionally complete PolyGerrit UI. The number of users choosing PolyGerrit jumped from 10% to 35% (3.5x times) with a +70% growth in the number of accesses overall. That means that the adoption was mainly driven by users attracted by the new UI.

In the past 12 months, PolyGerrit became the default user-interface and was just renamed as Gerrit UI. Gradually more and more users abandoned the old GWT interface that now represents 30% of the overall accesses.

Timeline of the upgrade

For the 70% of people that are using already using the new Gerrit UI, the upgrade to Gerrit v3.0 would not be noticeable at all:

• Gerrit v3.0 UI is absolutely identical to the current one in v2.16
• All existing API and integration points (e.g. Jenkins integration) in Gerrit v3.0 are 100% compatible with v2.16

For the 30% of people that are still using the old GWT UI, things will be very different as their favorite interface will not be available anymore.

The upgrade will happen with zero-downtime across the various GerritHub.io multi-site deployments and will start around mid-June.

Can I still use GWT with GerritHub.io?

The simple answer is NO: Gerrit v3.0 does not contain any GWT code anymore and thus it is impossible for GerritHub.io to bring back the old UI.

The journey to fill the gaps and reach 100% feature and functional equivalence between the old GWT and the new Polymer-based UI took around 6 years, 18k commits and 1M lines of code written by 260+ contributors from 60+ different organizations. It has been tested by hundreds of thousands of developers across the globe and is 100% production-ready and functionally complete.

If you feel that there was “something you could do in the GWT UI and cannot do anymore with the new Polymer-based UI”, please file a bug to the Gerrit Code Review issue tracker and you will get prompt attention and replies from the community.

Can I stay with Gerrit v2.16 on GerritHub.io?

If your organization cannot migrate to Gerrit v3.0, you could still request a dedicated hosting to GerritForge Ltd, which is the company behind GerritHub.io.

Please fill up the GerritForge feedback form and one Sales Representative will come back to you with the possible options and costs associated.

If you fully endorse GerritHub.io with Gerrit v3.0 and start using the new UI, the service will continue to be FREE for public and private repositories, organizations of all types and size. You can optionally purchase Enterprise Support from one of our plans if you require extra help in using and configuring your Gerrit projects with your tools and organization.

Enjoy the future of Gerrit v3.0 with GerritHub.io and GerritForge.

Luca Milanesio, GerritForge Ltd.
Gerrit Code Review Maintainer and Release Manager
Member of the Engineering Steering Committee