Category Archives: code-review

How Git and Gerrit are Re-Tooling for the Age of AI

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A Special Report from the Gerrit User Summit 2025

First, a huge thank you to the OpenInfra Foundation for hosting this event in Paris. Their invitation to have the Gerrit User Summit join the rest of the community set the stage for a truly collaborative and impactful gathering.

Paris last weekend wasn’t just a conference; it was a reunion. Fourteen years after the last GitTogether at Google’s Mountain View HQ, the “Git and Gerrit, together again” spirit was electric.

On October 18-19, luminaries from the early days (Scott, Martin, Luca, and many others) reconvened, sharing the floor with the new generation of innovators. The atmosphere was intense, filled with the same collaborative energy of 2011, but focused on a new set of challenges. The core question: how to evolve Git and Gerrit for the next decade of software development, a future dominated by AI, massive scale, and an urgent demand for smarter workflows.

Here are the key dispatches from the summit floor.

A Historic Reunion, A Shared Future

This event was a powerful reminder that the open-source spirit of cross-pollination is alive and well. The discussions were invigorated by the “fresh air” from new-school tools like GitButler and Jujutsu (JJ), which are fundamentally rethinking the developer experience.

In a significant show of industry-wide collaboration, we were delighted to have GitLab actively participating. Patrick’s technical presentation on the status of reftable was a highlight, but his engagement in discussions on collaborative solutions moving forward with the Gerrit community truly set the tone. It’s clear that the challenges ahead are shared by all platforms, and the solutions will be too.

Scaling Git in the Age of AI

The central theme was scale. In this rapidly accelerating AI era, software repositories are growing at an unprecedented rate across all platforms—Gerrit, GitHub, and GitLab alike. This isn’t a linear increase; it’s an explosion, and it’s pushing SCM systems to their breaking point.

The consensus was clear: traditional vertical and horizontal scaling is no longer enough. The community is now in a race to explore new techniques—from the metal up—to improve performance, slash memory usage, and make core Git operations efficient at a scale we’ve never seen before. This summit was a rare chance for maintainers from different ecosystems to align on these shared problems and forge collaborative paths to solutions.

Dispatches from the Front Lines: NVIDIA and Qualcomm

This challenge isn’t theoretical. We heard powerful testimonials from industry giants NVIDIA and Qualcomm, who are on the front lines of the AI revolution.

They shared fascinating and sobering insights into the repository explosion they are actively managing. Their AI workflows—encompassing massive datasets, huge model binaries, and unprecedented CI/CD activity—are generating data on a scale that is stressing even the most robust SCM systems. Their presentations detailed the unique challenges and innovative approaches they are pioneering to tackle this data gravity, providing invaluable real-world context that fueled the summit’s technical deep dives.

Beyond the Pull Request: The Quest for a ‘Commit-First’ World

One of the most passionate debates centered on the developer workflow itself. The wider Git community increasingly recognizes that the traditional, monolithic “pull request” model is ill-suited to the “change-focused” code review that platforms like Gerrit have championed for years.

The benefits of a change-based workflow, cleaner history, better hygiene, and higher-quality atomic changes—are driving a growing interest in standardizing a persistent Change-ID for each commit. This would make structured, atomic reviews a first-class citizen in Git itself. The collaboration at the summit between the Gerrit community, GitButler, JJ, and other Git contributors on defining this standard was a major breakthrough.

This shift is being powered by tools like GitButler and JJ, which are built on a core philosophy: Workflow Over Plumbing. Modifying commits, rebasing, and resolving conflicts remain intimidating hurdles for many developers. The Git command line can be complex and unintuitive. These new tools abstract that complexity away, guiding users through commit management in a way that feels natural. The result is faster iteration, higher confidence, and a far better developer experience.

AI and the Evolving Craft of Code Review

Finally, no technical summit in 2025 would be complete without a deep dive into AI. The arrival of AI-assisted coding is fundamentally shifting the dynamic between author and reviewer.

Engineers at the summit expressed a cautious optimism. On one hand, AI is a powerful tool to accelerate reviews, improve consistency, and bolster safety. On the other, everyone is aware of the trade-offs. Carelessly used, AI-generated code can weaken knowledge sharing, blur IP boundaries, and erode a team’s deep, institutional understanding of its own codebase.

The challenge going forward is not to replace the human in the loop, but to strengthen the craft of collaborative review by integrating AI as a true co-pilot.

A Path to 100x Scale: The GHS Initiative

The most forward-looking discussions at the summit centered on how to achieve the massive scale required. One of the most promising solutions presented was GHS (Git-at-High-Speed). This innovative approach is not just an incremental improvement; it’s a strategic initiative designed to increase SCM throughput by as much as 100x.

The project’s vision is to enable platforms like Gerrit, GitLab, and GitHub Enterprise to handle the explosive repository growth and build traffic generated by modern AI workflows. By re-architecting key components for hyper-scalability, GHS represents a concrete path forward, ensuring that the industry’s most critical SCMs can meet the unprecedented demands of the AI-driven future.

The Road from Paris

The Gerrit User Summit 2025 was more than a look back at the “glorious days.” It was a statement. The Git and Gerrit communities are unified, energized, and actively building the next generation of SCM. The spirit of GItTogether 2011 is back, but this time it’s armed with 14 years of experience and a clear-eyed view of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Antonio Barone – Gerrit Maintainer, Release Manager
Luca Milanesio – Gerrit Maintainer, Release Manager, Gerrit Engineering Steering Committee
Jacek Centkowski – Gerrit Maintainer

GerritForge 2024 in review: Git, Gerrit Code Review and more

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As 2024 draws to a close, it’s a great time to reflect on the milestones and achievements of the GerritForge team in innovating Git performance with the release of GHS, supporting and advancing the Gerrit Code Review project with 20 releases and over 1.5k commits. This year has been one of exciting developments and initiatives that have made Gerrit stronger, more accessible, and better equipped to meet the needs of modern software teams. Here’s what GerritForge accomplished for the Git and Gerrit Code Review ecosystem in 2024.

2024 in numbers

  • 1,500 changes merged
  • 40 repositories involved in the Gerrit and JGit projects
  • 20 releases
  • 5 conferences, 6 meetups
  • 11 contributors, 4 maintainers
  • 20k man/hours spent in open-source projects

Managing the Releases of Gerrit 3.10 and 3.11

As usual, we continue to ensure the regular releases of new Gerrit versions. This year was no exception with the releases of Gerrit 3.10 and 3.11. These releases introduced new features, performance optimisations, and bug fixes to further solidify Gerrit as the leading code review tool for large-scale projects.

Our team cooperated with the Gerrit Code Review community to ensure these releases were stable, well-documented, and aligned with community needs. From coordinating release schedules to ensuring compatibility with plugins and integrations, GerritForge played a key role in making these versions a reality.

Key Highlights

  • Gerrit 3.10 brought major improvements in user experience, including refined UI capabilities and enhanced search functionality.
  • Gerrit 3.11 introduced critical updates to multi-site support, security enhancements, and significant performance boosts.

GerritMeets success in both the USA and Europe

The GerritMeets series has become a cornerstone of community engagement, and 2024 was no exception. GerritForge organised six GerritMeets across several locations, including California, Germany, and the UK, bringing together contributors, users, and maintainers to share knowledge, discuss trends, and explore use cases.
Each session covered a diverse range of topics, including:

  • Best practices for multi-site setups.
  • Advanced plugin development.
  • Gerrit performance tuning for large repositories.
  • Innovations in CI/CD workflows with Gerrit.

These virtual meetups provided a platform for collaboration and learning, reinforcing Gerrit’s community spirit. All the recordings of the 2024 GerritMeets are available as a playlist on the GerritForge TV YouTube channel.

World-class Enterprise Gerrit-as-a-Service on Google Cloud Platform

In 2024, GerritForge expanded Gerrit’s capabilities by adding support for Gerrit-as-a-Service (GaaS) on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This initiative makes it easier than ever for organizations to adopt Gerrit without the operational overhead of managing infrastructure.

Benefits of Gerrit-as-a-Service on GCP

  • Scalability: Leveraging GCP’s powerful infrastructure to scale Gerrit deployments for enterprises of any size.
  • Simplicity: Reducing setup and maintenance complexity, allowing teams to focus on development and code reviews.
  • High Availability: Utilizing GCP’s advanced networking and storage capabilities for improved uptime and disaster recovery.

By enabling Gerrit on GCP, GerritForge is broadening the tool’s accessibility, particularly for teams looking for a cloud-native, fully managed solution.

Gerrit User Summit with Qualcomm

This year’s Gerrit User Summit, organized by Qualcomm in collaboration with GerritForge, was a highlight for the community. Held at the Qualcomm HQ in San Diego, CA (USA), the summit offered a chance for Gerrit enthusiasts worldwide to come together in person.
The agenda featured:

  • Keynotes by Gerrit maintainers and industry leaders.
  • Hands-on hackathon for contributors and users.
  • Insightful panels on the future of Gerrit.

The collaboration with Qualcomm not only expanded the summit’s reach but also highlighted Gerrit’s growing importance in enterprise environments.

Showcasing GHS and Gerrit Code Review worldwide

This year, GerritForge actively participated in numerous conferences to showcase GHS and expand Gerrit’s visibility, and demonstrate its unique capabilities. These events were a fantastic opportunity to uncover GHS and showcase Gerrit to hundreds of developers who had never encountered it.

At these conferences, we showcased:

  • GHS: It demonstrates its seamless integration with Git and showcases a whopping 100x performance improvement over a vanilla setup thanks to the power of AI and reinforcement learning.
  • K8s-Gerrit: Highlighting how Gerrit deployed on Kubernetes provides unparalleled flexibility, performance, and multi-site support.

Through live demos, presentations, and Q&A sessions, we highlighted GHS and Gerrit’s ability to scale, its unique review model, and its role in making software delivery pipelines up to 100x times faster.

K8s-Gerrit Hackathon with SAP

Collaboration was at the forefront of the k8s-Gerrit Hackathon, co-hosted by GerritForge and SAP. The hackathon brought together developers from both SAP and GerritForge teams to tackle the challenges of Kubernetes-based Gerrit deployments and multi-site support.

Outcomes of the Hackathon

  • Enhanced scalability for k8s-Gerrit deployments.
  • Breakthroughs in multi-site replication and disaster recovery.
  • Valuable contributions to the Gerrit codebase and documentation.

The event exemplified the power of open collaboration, pushing Gerrit further into cloud-native development.

Looking Ahead to 2025

As we celebrate the progress made in 2024, we remain focused on the road ahead. GerritForge is committed to:

  • Public offering of GHS
  • Gerrit-as-a-Service in Google Cloud
  • Gerrit Code Review v3.12 and v3.13
  • More GerritMeets and Gerrit User Summit events

Our gratitude goes out to the Git and Gerrit Code Review communities, contributors, and partners who have made this year a success. Together, we’re building a tool that empowers teams to deliver high-quality code faster and more efficiently.
Here’s to an even more impactful 2025!

Daniele Sassoli – Gerrit Code Review Community Manager
Luca Milanesio – JGit Committer / Gerrit Code Review Engineering Steering Committee / Release Manager and Maintainer

2023: New Year and opportunities for GerritForge and Gerrit Code Review

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TL;DR: GerritForge has been dedicating its efforts to organising and managing the Gerrit User Summit in London back in November 2022, in conjunction with the release of Gerrit v3.7. The event has been a great success, with a significant presence on-site and record-breaking attendees on the GerritForge TV youtube channel. It has also committed to its promises to research and improve the JGit and Gerrit scalability to large mono-repos, with tens of millions of objects and refs. 2023 will see the finalisation of these efforts with an increase in development efforts and a new JGit Committer for pushing the platform to a new level of performance and scalability and a new innovating system for collecting and optimising the repository metrics automatically. Stay tuned.

Read the full story here below (9 mins read).

2022 has been a critical year for turning the Gerrit Code Review community and development back on track after the COVID-19 pandemic. At GerritForge, we’ve been working hard to make sure that the development, support, and innovation of Gerrit Code Review continue on its main objectives.

Gerrit Code Review v3.6 and v3.7

We have continued to deliver on the development and release of Gerrit Code Review and its plugins, helping the testing and releasing of versions v3.6.0 (May) and v3.7.0 (November).

Some numbers of the past 12 months’ development contributions by individual committers and companies:

  • 3,627 Changes have been merged on 76 projects related to the Gerrit Code Review platform, including JGit
  • 113 committers from 42 different organisations

A special mention to the top #10 contributors: Google (Ben Rohlfs, Edwin Kempin, Chris Pouchet, Dhruv Srivastava, Frank Borden, Milutin Kristofic), GerritForge (Luca Milanesio), Wikimedia (Paladox) and SAP (Matthias Sohn and Thomas Dräbing).

In comparison with 2021, we had 25% fewer changes merged but with more contributors coming from more companies, which is a symptom to a very healthy and thriving ecosystem of maintainers.

GerritForge has committed to resuming the face-to-face user summits, which were suspended since 2020.

The Gerrit User Summit 2022 took place in London, UK the 10-11 of November in a hybrid format, with people having the opportunity to participate either on-site or remotely on GerritForge’s YouTube TV channel.

It was a glorious success, with record-breaking attendance from all around the globe:

  • 50 people registered to attend on-site, 26 of them managed to arrive despite the London tube strike, whilst the others attended remotely
  • 235 people viewed the summit on YouTube with an average view time of 40 mins (one talk)

The summit survey had an outstanding report showing a huge acceptance and appreciation of the event:

  • 82% rated the remote video streaming as “good” or “outstanding”
  • 96% rated the quality of the summit as “good” or “outstanding.”
  • 100% would recommend the summit to a colleague, with 83% strongly recommending it

GerritHub.io SLA gets closer to five-nines.

We have been working hard to make Gerrit more stable and resilient throughout 2022, discovering and fixing many issues in the code base and on the multi-site software architecture.
In 2022, GerritHub.io had only six small hiccups for a total of 19 mins of downtime (SLA = 99.997%) over a 12-month period, a 75% reliability improvement compared to 2021.

We have run extensive RCAs on the causes of the downtime and identified two leading issues, which are explained in the details below.

The “anonymous unlimited query” hole in Gerrit
GerritHub.io has been subject to a 15 mins outage because of anonymous users being able to bring offline all the sites before the system could auto-recover.
Gerrit allows bypassing of all limits set in the ACLs for running queries by simply adding the “no-limit” parameter.
Returning an arbitrary payload without limits could allow a single user to generate a server-side workload for collecting and building a GBytes-sized JSON payload; unfortunately, that option was available to everyone, including anonymous users making any publicly faced Gerrit Code Review installation subject to deny-of-service attacks.
We have identified the issue, reported and fixed it in Gerrit with Change 333304, which has been included in Gerrit v3.3.10, v3.4.4, v3.5.1, and all v3.6.0 or later releases.

More granular monitoring and alerting
We have lowered the threshold of uptime checks on GerritHub.io to 1 minute, giving us the ability to detect and react immediately to 4 smaller hiccups. We have detected a lack of scalability for some specific higher-load projects. Those hiccups have been responsible for 2 mins of downtime over the 2nd part of 2022. Many more projects are also planning to be onboarded on GerritHub.io; hence we do need to address this project-specific capacity needs.

Scaling Gerrit Code Review and JGit beyond its limits

We have been investing a massive effort in building a test environment designed to stress Gerrit and JGit to its limits and identify all the limitations and bottlenecks that prevented us from scaling further.

Scaling the test repository
We have created over the months some test repositories that increased in every dimension:

  • Tens of millions of refs as both refs/changes and refs/heads
  • Millions of delta-chains
  • Tens of millions of Git objects
  • Packfiles of tens of Giga-bytes and packed refs of hundreds of megabytes

For generating a significant load on both client and server side, we have invested more into the aws-gerrit cloud setups and gatling-git performance loading tool.

There were some “well-known” issues and additional surprising ones.

SHA1 complexity and CPU utilization for large entities
JGit has been used SHA1 for identifying uniqueness not just for Git objects but also for other large entities. However, computing SHA1 has become increasingly CPU intensive because of the relatively recent findings about collisions on shattered.io.
We have highlighted two major potential improvements in cooperation with Matthias Sohn (SAP) on the raw SHA1 performance and its application for detecting packed-refs changes on the filesystem.

Commit priority queues
JGit has a custom implementation of priority queues which are intensively used in RevWalk, which has almost quadratic complexity. That isn’t a problem for small to medium chains of commits; however, when the number of commits reaches millions, the performance degradation becomes unbearable.
We have replaced the JGit’s custom implementation with the one provided by the Java JVM library, which has a logarithmic complexity that massively improves its performance with large commit chains.

Unwanted reachability checks
JGit needs to perform a full reachability check whenever a remote unknown client is advertising refs, which makes sense when serving a remote client. However, the cost of full reachability of millions of advertised refs can be a daunting task that may be alleviated if the remote end can be considered trusted.

Fixing JGit bitmaps
Since the introduction of Git bitmap, the whole community has learned how key they are in speeding up the counting and selection during the clone phase.
However, large and unoptimized bitmaps could be so unhelpful for Git that instead of speeding up, they could represent a massive overhead for the system, causing CPU spikes and, eventually, lowering the throughput of the server.
Git bitmaps are compressed using the JavaEWAH library, which is good for memory consumption but evil for CPU utilization: that is the reason why the smaller is best for performance.
We have discovered and fixed a critical issue with the JGit bitmap generation that was causing the inclusion of all commits and BLOBs pointed by annotated tags. Also, we have introduced the ability to inform JGit about the heads that can be excluded from the bitmap, allowing to shorten the creation tens of thousands times (5h generation time for a 2k refs to as little as 60s) and increase its effectiveness by 200%.

Millions of unneeded ref logs
When performing a clone of a repository with millions of heads, JGit created one local reflog file for every remote ref, including the ones there were not actually cloned but just fetched as remote references. This was creating a significant performance gap between JGit and Git, which would instead lazily create the reflog files once they are effectively checked out the first time. Cloning a single branch of a repository with millions of remote refs took around 1h, compared to a few minutes of Git.

All of the findings were included in multiple updates on the following components:

  • JGit changes: all fixes were also provided to stable-5.13, the last supported branch for Java 8, which allows benefiting from these improvements for older versions of Gerrit from v2.16 onwards.
  • pull-replication went through major performance improvements, achieving a 1000x times faster execution time compared to the traditional replication plugin
  • aws-gerrit is going through upgrades for making use of pull-replication plugin, including the support for the bearer token which allows to replicate virtually any repository, including All-Users.git
  • gatling-git: we have upgraded the Gatling version and JGit to the latest stable-5.13 to include the latest performance improvements.
  • git-repo-metrics: we have introduced a brand-new plugin that allows us to keep under control the major dimensions of a repository and therefore graph their increase over time.

GerritForge goals for 2023

We are definitely not done yet with the performance improvements on Gerrit and JGit: there are still significant improvements to be made, and JGit changes to get merged into the mainstream branches.
We believe we are on track to finalize the job and allow a stable and scalable platform for large Git repositories in 2023.

Finalise what we cooked in 2022 for JGit
JGit has a new maintainer, David Ostrovsky, awarded in 2022 as Git committer of the project. GerritForge’s devs are focused to get more reviews and attention to the JGit performance improvements. We are committed to finalising all the open changes related to large repositories.

JGit multi-pack indexes support
There is still a major gap between JGit and Git when dealing with very active repositories: multi-pack indexes. The proliferation of packfiles would eventually lead to a long and painful search-for-reuse phase for BLOBs which could be cut down 100s of times with a multi-pack index.

Git repository optimiser for Gerrit
We have been working on tracking the live information on the Git repository, thanks to the git-repo-metrics plugin. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool that can do something with it and automatically?
We would be doing R&D on how to correlate the repository metrics, the Git audit trail, and the performance data for making AI-based decisions on what needs to be improved on the repository.
This work stream is going to be useful for any Git repository, not just the ones powered by Gerrit Code Review. The ‘git-repo-metrics’ and the repository optimiser would also apply to other products, including GitHub and GitLab.

Gerrit v3.8 and projects-specific change numbers
We will finalise the design document for the transition to project-specific change numbers in Gerrit v3.8. That would allow the seamless migration of projects across Gerrit setups without having to worry about changes renumbering anymore.

Gerrit Code Review testing and GerritForge-certified binaries
GerritForge is spending a tremendous amount of time developing test environments and tools for serving the Gerrit community with more stable releases and improving the quality of its code. We want to intensify the effort and also offer our platinum support customers a unique service that includes the GerritForge digital signature and rubber stamp on the binaries of Gerrit Code Review and its plugins that have been successfully tested and validated for being production-ready.
Stay tuned; more details are coming soon …

GerritForge company forecast in 2023

GerritForge Inc. will finalise its roll-out to the USA, and all contracts and services will be run from Sunnyvale, CA and Europe. Over 2022, 60% of the customers and businesses have already been moved, and the operation will be completed over the course of 2023.

We are looking forward to doubling our revenue figures in 2023 and also our contributions to the open-source community, with a main focus on JGit as the driver of performance growth for Gerrit Code Review.

2023 is going to be an incredible year for GerritForge, Gerrit Code Review, and the JGit community altogether.

Happy New start of the Year 2023!

Luca Milanesio (GerritForge)
Gerrit Code Review Maintainer and Release Manager
Member of the Gerrit Engineering Steering Committee

2022 GOALS for Gerrit

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The year 2021 has been a challenging one because of the COVID-19 global emergency; nevertheless, the Gerrit Code Review project has continued to deliver what the community expected:

GerritForge delivered on the promise of making Gerrit more cloud-native, with a particular focus on AWS, the platform that most users have adopted for running in the cloud. GoogleCloud has also been our focus, assuring a cloud-neutral approach to Gerrit and providing support for events over PubSub.

Focusing on Gerrit unique values

A successful product focuses on what makes it unique and innovative, compared to anything else in the world.

We believe that the key aspects that make Gerrit Code Review THE platform of choice for developing software based on Git repositories are:

  • Large-scale
    Gerrit is THE best platform for developing large-scale projects, huge monorepos, and a large number of changes and refs.
  • Maximum availability
    Large organizations and communities of developers need a platform that is always available, anywhere, anytime, 24×7, and 365 days a year.
  • Performance
    The need to work remotely poses multiple issues, one of them being the increase of network latency. Gerrit multi-site distribution of the repositories and reviews allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to clone, push and review at optimal latency and performance.
  • Quality of tracing of reviews
    Gerrit is based on single-commit code reviews, a winning approach in terms of review accuracy and supporting changes chains, and full traceability of the entire review history and workflow.

Many popular Git code-review tools exist in the Open-Source community; Gerrit is the winning choice when scale, availability, performance, and quality do matter.

GerritForge goals for improving Gerrit in 2022

Scale Gerrit beyond limits

GerritForge and the rest of the community have worked hard to identify the bottlenecks of large mono-repos with Gerrit. Some of them can be mitigated by keeping the Git repository lean and organized, despite the massive amount of push traffic and reviews coming from large teams.

We want to focus on improving at least ten times the following KPIs, without having a significant impact on the overall system performance:

  • Number of changes and refs in a repository: millions of changes and tens of millions of refs
  • Size of the repository: hundreds of GBs

GerritForge will step up its involvement in the JGit project in 2022 and introduce many innovations, some of them already implemented in the C-Git implementation:

  • JGit support for multi-pack index
  • Revamp of JGit cache, allowing the pluggability of high-performance implementations
  • Improvement of JGit bitmaps for large number of refs
  • Support for high-performance large storage systems
  • Introduction of new performance metrics
  • Replace Prolog with native submit rules in the owners plugin

99.999% up-time

GerritForge maintains a free service known as GerritHub.io to demonstrate what Gerrit can do and achieve. GerritHub.io is the most advanced and reliable Open-Source vanilla Gerrit deployment, apart from Google’s.

GerritHub.io uptime in 2021 – checked and reported by PIngdom.com

We achieved an astonishing 99.99% SLA in 2021; we want to push the GerritHub.io uptime further to 99.999%, reducing the annual downtime to just 315s.

In order to reach a five-nines uptime, we will work on:

  • Granular probing and health-checks
  • Advanced repositories performance monitoring and alerting
  • Gerrit limits and deadlines
  • RCAs
  • Multi-site improvements

Goal #3: Increase 1000x times the Gerrit replication performance

GerritForge has presented the innovating pull-replication plugin at the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021, showing that it is possible to replicate Git commits and changes meta-data across the globe with msec latency. The pull-replication plugin technology and speed is going to be improved and made available and Open-Sourced to anyone and match and outperform the traditional replication plugin features.

Join the 2022 endeavor


We need YOU and the Gerrit community’s help and support in this 2022 endeavor.

GerritForge has already increased his Team of contributors working on the project, including three Gerrit maintainers and two Gerrit release managers. However, Gerrit’s success is in the cooperation, contribution, and ideas of the whole community of contributors, Gerrit admins, and users.

Let us know what you think about our goals. We are happy to cooperate and work with anyone sharing the same values and goals.

2022 is the year where Gerrit Code Review is pushed beyond its limits even further, making it the MOST innovative tool for large-scale repositories and teams worldwide.

Crunch Code Review hashtags with Gerrit DevOps Analytics

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Screenshot 2020-05-12 at 11.13.06.pngWe have already discussed in previous posts how important it is to speedup the feedback loop in your Software Development Lifecycle. Having early feedbacks gives you the chance of evaluating your hypothesis and eventually change direction if needed. 

The more information you have, the smarter can be your decisions.

We recently added in our Gerrit DevOps Analytics the possibility of extracting data coming from Code Reviews’ metadata to extend the knowledge we can get out of Gerrit.

Furthermore, it is possible to extract meta-data from repositories not necessarily hosted on the Gerrit instance running the analytics processing. This is a big improvement since it allows to fully analyse repositories coming from any Gerrit server.

For example, the Gerrit analytics we are providing on https://analytics.gerrithub.io are coming from the Gerrit repository hosted on the gerrit-review.googlesource.com, the Gerrit server hosted by Google.

Hashtags aggregation

One important type of meta-data contained in the Code Reviews is the hashtag.

Hashtags are freeform strings associated with a change, like on social media platforms. In Gerrit, you explicitly associate hashtags with changes using a dedicated area of the UI; they are not parsed from commit messages or comments.

Similar to topics, hashtags can be used to group related changes together and to search using the hashtag: operator. Unlike topics, a change can have multiple hashtags, and they are only used for informational grouping; changes with the same hashtags are not necessarily submitted together.

You can use them, for example, to mark and easily search all the changes blocking a particular release:

Screenshot 2020-05-12 at 10.43.00.png

Hashtags can also be used to aggregate all the changes people have been working on during a particular event, for example, the Gerrit User Summit 2019 hackathon:

Screenshot 2020-05-12 at 10.44.39.png

The latest version of the Gerrit Analytics plugin exposes the hashtags attached to their respecting Git commit data. Let’s explore together some use cases:

The most popular Gerrit Code Review hashtags over the last 12 months

Screenshot 2020-05-12 at 10.47.49.png

Throughput of changes created during an event

see for example the Palo alto hackathon (#palo-alto-2018). We can see at the end of the week the spike of changes to release Gerrit 2.16.

Screenshot 2020-05-12 at 10.56.44.png

The extend of time for a feature

Removing GWT was an extensive effort which started in 2017 and ended in 2019. It took several hackathons to tackle the removal as shown by the hashtags distribution. Some changes were started in one hackathon and finalised in the next one.

Screenshot 2020-05-12 at 11.05.51.png

Those were some example of useful information on how to leverage the power of GDA.

The above examples are taken from the GDA dashboard provided and hosted by GerritForge on https://analytics.gerrithub.io which mirror commits and reviews on a regular basis from the Gerrit project and its plugin ecosystem.

How to setup GDA on Gerrit

Hashtag extraction is currently available from Gerrit 3.1 onwards. You can download the latest version released from the Gerrit CI.

To enable hashtag extraction you need to enable the feature extraction in the plugin config file as follow:

# analitycs.config
[contributors]
  extract-hashtags = true

For more information on how to configure and run the plugin, look at the analytics plugin documentation.

Conclusion

Data is the goldmine of your company. You need more and more of it for making smarter decision. The latest version of the GDA allows you to leverage even more data produced during the code review process.

You can explore the potential of the information held in Gerrit on the analytics dashboard provided by GerritForge on analytics.gerrithub.io.

If you would like your open source Gerrit hosted project to be added to our dashboard or would need help in setting up and supporting GDA for your organization, get in touch with GerritForge Sales Team and we can help you making smarter decisions today.

Gerrit v3.0 is here

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GerritSprintHackathon2019.photo

Gerrit v3.0 has been released during the last Spring Hackathon at Google in Munich involving over 20+ developers for one week.

It can be downloaded from www.gerritcodereview.com/3.0.html and installed on top of any existing Gerrit v2.16/NoteDb installations. Native packages have been distributed through the standard channels and upgrading is as simple as shutting down the service, running the Rpm, Deb or Dnf upgrade command and starting again.

You can also try Gerrit v3.0 using Docker by simply running the following command:

docker run -ti -p 8080:8080 -p 29418:29418 gerritcodereview/gerrit:3.0.0

This article goes through the whole history of the Gerrit v3.0 development and highlights the differences between the previous releases.

Milestone for the Gerrit OpenSource Project

Finally, after 6 years, 18k commits and 1M lines of code written by 260+ contributors from 60+ different organizations, Gerrit v3.0 is finally out.

The event is a fundamental milestone for the project for two reasons:

  • The start of a new journey for Gerrit, without the legacy code of the old GUI based on Google Web Toolkit and without any relational database. Gerrit is now fully based on a Git repository and nothing else.
  • The definition of a clear community organization, with the foundation of a new Engineering Steering Committee and the role of Community Manager.

The new structure will drive the product forward for the years to come and will help to define a clear roadmap to bring back Gerrit at the center of the Software Development Pipeline.

Evolution vs. revolution

When a product release increments the first major number, it typically introduces a series of massive breaking changes and, unfortunately, a period of instability. Gerrit, however, is NOT a typical OpenSource product, because since the beginning it has been based on rigorous Code Review that brought stability and reliability from its initial inception back in 2008. Gerrit v3.0 was developed during the years by following a rigorous backward compatibility rule that has made Gerrit one of the most reliable and scalable Code Review systems on the planet.

For all the existing Gerrit v2.16 installations, the v3.0 will be much more similar to a rather minor upgrade and may not even require any downtime and interruption of the incoming read/write traffic, assuming that you have at least a high-availability setup. How is this possible? Magic? Basically, yes, it’s a “kind of magic” that made this happen, and it is all thanks to the new repository format for storing all the review meta-data: NoteDb.

Last but not least, all the feature that Gerrit v3.0 brings to the table, have been implemented iteratively over the last 6 years and released gradually from v2.13 onwards. Gerrit v3.0 is the “final step” of the implementation that fills the gaps left open in the past v2.16 release.

With regards to statistics of the changes from v2.16 to v3.0, it is clear that the code-base has been basically stabilized and cleaned up, as you can see from the official GerritForge Code Analytics extracted from analytics.gerrithub.io .

  • 1.5k commits from 63 contributors worldwide
  • 62k lines added and 72k lines removed
  • Google, CollabNet, and GerritForge are the top#3 organizations that invested in developing this release

In a nutshell, the Gerrit code-base has shrunk of 10k lines of code, compared to v2.16. So, instead of talking of what’s new in v3.0, we should instead describe what inside the 72k lines removed.

Removal of the GWT UI

The GWT UI, also referred to as “Old UI” has been around since the inception of the project back in 2008.

Gerrit.GWT-UI

Back in 2008, it seemed a good idea to build Gerrit UI on top of GWT, a Web Framework founded by Google two years earlier and aimed at reusing the same Java language for both backend and the Ajax front-end.

However, starting in 2012, things started to change. The interest of the overall community in GWT decreased, as clearly shown by the StackOverflow trends.

Screenshot 2019-05-18 at 23.34.42

In 2015, Andrew Bonventre from the Chromium Project, one of the major users of the Gerrit Code Review platform, apart from the Android Developers, presented the new prototype of the Gerrit Code Review UI, based on the Polymer project, with the code-name of PolyGerrit, and merged as change #72086.

commit ba698359647f565421880b0487d20df086e7f82a
Author: Andrew Bonventre <andybons@google.com>
Date: Wed Nov 4 11:14:54 2015 -0500

Add the skeleton of a new UI based on Polymer, PolyGerrit

This is the beginnings of an experimental new non-GWT web UI developed
using a modern JS web framework, http://www.polymer-project.org/. It
will coexist alongside the GWT UI until it is feature-complete.

The functionality of this change is light years from complete, with
a full laundry list of things that don't work. This change is simply
meant to get the starting work in and continue iteration afterward.

The contents of the polygerrit-ui directory started as the full tree of
https://github.com/andybons/polygerrit at 219f531, plus a few more
local changes since review started. In the future this directory will
be pruned, rearranged, and integrated with the Buck build.

Change-Id: Ifb6f5429e8031ee049225cdafa244ad1c21bf5b5

The PolyGerrit project introduced two major innovations:

  • Gerrit REST-API: for the first time the interaction of the code-review process has been formalized in stable and well-documented REST-API that can be used as “backend contract” for the design of the new GUI
  • The PolyGerrit front-end Team: for the first time, a specific experienced Team focused on user experience and UI workflow was dedicated to rethink and redesign iteratively all the components of the Gerrit Code Review interactions.

The GWT UI and PolyGerrit lived in the same “package” from v2.14 onwards for two years, with the users left with the option to switch between the two. Then in 2018 with v2.16 the PolyGerrit UI became the “default” interface and thus renamed just “Gerrit” UI.

With Gerrit v3.0, the entire GWT code-base in Gerrit has been completely removed with the epic change by David Ostrovsky “Remove GWT UI“, which deleted 33k lines of code in one single commit.

The new Polymer-based UI of Gerrit Code Review is not very different than the one seen in Gerrit v2.16, but includes more bug fixes and is 100% feature complete, including the projects administrations and ACLs configuration.

Screenshot 2019-05-18 at 22.58.13

Removal of ReviewDb

Gerrit v3.0 does not have a DBMS anymore, not even for storing its schema version as it happened in v2.16. This means that almost everything gets stored in the Git repositories.

The journey started back in October 2013, when Shawn Pearce gave to Dave Borowitz the task to convert all the review meta-data managed by Gerrit into a new format inside the Git repository, called NoteDb.

After two years of design and implementation, Dave Borowitz presented NoteDb at the Gerrit User Summit 2015 and called Gerrit v3.0 the release that will be fully working without the need of any other external DBMS (see the full description of the talk at https://storage.googleapis.com/gerrit-talks/summit/2015/NoteDB.pdf).

Google started adopting NoteDb in parallel with ReviewDb on their own internal setup and in June 2017, the old changes table was definitely removed. However, there was more in the todo-list: at the Gerrit User Summit 2017, Dave Borowitz presented the final roadmap to make ReviewDb finally disappear from everyone’s Gerrit server.

Screenshot 2019-05-18 at 23.18.28

In the initial plans, the first version with NoteDb fully working should have been v2.15. However, things went a bit differently and a new minor release was needed in 2018 to make the format really stable and reliable with v2.16.

Gerrit v2.16 is officially the last release that contains both code-bases and allows the migration from ReviewDb to NoteDb.

Dave Borowitz used the hashtag “RemoveReviewDb” to allow anyone to visualize the huge set of commits that removed 35k lines of code complexity from the Gerrit project.

Migrating to Gerrit v3.0, step-by-step

Gerrit v3.0 requires NoteDb as pre-requisite: if you are on v2.16 with NoteDb, the migration to v3.0 is straightforward and can be done with the following simple steps:

  1. Shutdown Gerrit
  2. Upgrade Gerrit war and plugins
  3. Run Gerrit init with the “batch” option
  4. Start Gerrit

If you are running Gerrit in a high-availability configuration, the above process can be executed on the two nodes individually, with a rolling restart and without interrupting the incoming traffic.

If you are running an earlier version of Gerrit and you are still on ReviewDb, then you should upgrade in three steps:

  1. Migrate from your version v2.x (x < v2.16) to v2.16 staying on ReviewDb. Make sure to upgrade through all the intermediate versions. (Example: migrate from v2.13 to v2.14, then from v2.14 to v2.15 and finally from v2.15 to v2.16)
  2. Convert v2.16 from ReviewDb to NoteDb
  3. Migrate v2.16 to v3.0

The leftover of a DBMS stored onto H2 files

Is Gerrit v3.0 completely running without any DBMS at all? Yes and no. There is some leftover that isn’t necessarily associated with the Code Review meta-data and thus did not make sense to be stored in NoteDb.

  • Persistent storage for in-memory caches.
    Some of the Gerrit caches store their status on the filesystem as H2 tables, so that Gerrit can save a lot of CPU time after a restart reusing the previous in-memory cache status.
  • Reviewed flag of changes.
    Represents the flag that enables the “bold” rendering of a change, storing the update status for every user. It is stored by default on the filesystem as H2 table, however, can be alternatively stored on a remote DBMS or potentially managed by a plugin.

New core plugins

Some of the plugins that have been initially distributed only with the Native Packages and Docker versions are now an integral part of the WAR distribution as well:

  • delete-project
    which allows removing a project from Gerrit and the associated changes.
  • gitiles
    a lightweight code-browser created by Dave Borowitz based on JGit
  • plugin-manager
    the interface to discover, download and install Gerrit plugins
  • webhooks
    the HTTP-based remote trigger to schedule remote builds on CI systems or active any other service from a Gerrit event

The above four plugins already existed before Gerrit v3.0, but they were not included in the gerrit.war.

Farewell to Dave Borowitz and the PolyGerrit Team

After having completed the feature parity between GWT and PolyGerrit, the original PolyGerrit Team members left the Gerrit Code Review project.

Their journey came to an end with the release of the new shiny Polymer-based Gerrit UI. The PolyGerrit Team contributed 45k lines of code on 5.3k commits in 4 years.

Then the last event unfolded during the release of Gerrit v3.0: Dave Borowitz announced that he was leaving the Gerrit Code Review project. I defined the event like “Linus Torvalds announcing he was abandoning the Linux Kernel project”.

Dave Borowitz contributed 316k lines of code on 3.6k commits over 36 repositories in 8 years. He helped also the development of the new Gerrit Multi-Site plugin by donating its Zookeeper-based implementation of a global ref-database.

On behalf of GerritForge and the Gerrit Code Review community, I would like to thank all the past contributors and maintainers that made PolyGerrit and NoteDb code-base into Gerrit: Dave, Logan, Kasper, Becky, Viktar, Andrew and Wyatt.

Luca Milanesio – GerritForge
Gerrit Code Review Maintainer, Release Manager
and member of the Engineering Steering Committee

Gerrit User Summit: only two weeks away

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GerritUserSummitPaloAlto.png

It is exciting times for the Gerrit Code Review project, which is approaching its 10th anniversary. The very first commit is dated 14th of November 2008, exactly ten years back from the official kick-off the 15th of November 2018 of the Gerrit User Summit 2018 in Palo Alto

commit 23571ab1fa7fedc262d6c21510614353e9d8a4dc
Author: Shawn O. Pearce <sop@google.com>
Date: Fri Nov 14 16:56:58 2008 -0800

Initial project setup of Gerrit 2

Gerrit 2 is a ground-up rewrite of Gerrit, using GWT (Google Web
Toolkit) for the client side user interface and a Java servlet
based backend.

Signed-off-by: Shawn O. Pearce <sop@google.com>

An exciting schedule with talks about new features

The program is now complete and includes a lot of interesting talks about what’s new and noteworthy in Gerrit:

There are as well very interesting use-cases of using Gerrit in real-life scenarios:

The summit is kindly hosted by Cloudera, the world’s leader of the BigData OpenSource Platform. It is not a coincidence that there are talks about Gerrit and the DevOps Analytics:

Recordings of the Gerrit User Summit 2017 in London

The best way to get ready to the Summit this year is to watch what happened during the past 12 months, compared to what was announced at the Gerrit User Summit held at Skills Matter in Central London back in 2017, leveraging all the free content available on the GerritForge TV YouTube Channel. There is a lot to learn about Gerrit and its related technologies.

All the talks are now live, including the very interesting board discussion between the European members of the Gerrit Code Review community and the Maintainers of the project.

Don’t miss the dates, 15-16 November

2018 is an exceptional year for the Gerrit Community, and this Summit will most likely be the largest ever in the history of the Git Together and Gerrit User Summits of the past ten years.

Have a safe trip and see you soon see you at Cloudera HQ in Palo Alto Palo Alto.

Luca Milanesio – GerritForge
Gerrit Code Review Maintainer

 

 

 

 

GerritHub.io and the new Reviewer role

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Screen Shot 2018-06-21 at 08.57.58

Good news for all the people that wanted to use Gerrit Code Review on top of their GitHub repositories, but so far have been concerned about sharing their profile information: you can now keep your details private and still review other people’s changes on Gerrit.
If you are an EU citizen, you have rights guaranteed by the GDPR and the default role for accessing your GitHub OAuth scope can now be limited to what is the bare minimum.

The default scope explained

When signing up with GerritHub.io, you have the ability to define the scope of access to your personal information held on GitHub:

  • Your e-mail
  • Your membership to organizations and teams
  • Your repositories

The default access requested for doing some activity on Gerrit is: user:email + public:repo + read:org, that allows Gerrit to see your e-mail, clone and push on your behalf to your public repositories and see the list of your teams and organizations. Those permissions are needed when you want to push some code to GerritHub.io, and thus you need to allow Gerrit to resolve your groups (Organizations/Teams) and grant you permissions to push your code to Gerrit and eventually GitHub as well on your behalf.

The problem with GDPR

The default role may not fit with some of the conditions of GDPR for EU where you are not willing to contribute any code but participate in the review of existing changes. That’s why GerritHub.io introduced a new GitHub scope page that allows external reviewers to sign-up with the bare minimum information that Gerrit needs to let you in: your e-mail address.

Why can’t I stay anonymous on Gerrit?

Even though you could create a GitHub account without exposing any private information or exposing your e-mail, you cannot sign-up with Gerrit Code Review if you are not willing to share who you are.
The e-mail address in Gerrit is a crucial property, and without it, some parts of the code-review workflow would stop working. That condition of Gerrit is so pervasive in the architecture because of the requirements of the Android OpenSource Project (code-named AOSP) which is the project historically hosted on the platform: the . See the details of the Android contribution license and process at https://source.android.com/setup/start/licenses.

What if I still want to stay completely anonymous on Gerrit Code Review?

Gerrit has the concept of the “Anonymous Coward” (not an offense, just the default name assigned to it), which is an account that has only an ID without either a full name or an e-mail address. With the anonymous user, however, you cannot review code, for obvious legal reasons and for preventing spamming and abuse.

I am in doubt on what to chose, where to start from?

If you are concerned about sharing your Personal Information and you need to decide which level to use, then just chose “Reviewer” and you can amend your choice and extend your scope at any time later.

GerritHub.io donations to Shawn’s family

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Screen Shot 2018-01-30 at 22.11.20.png

Free and OpenSource, always

We never had a “Donate” button on GerritHub.io, we never needed one because Gerrit Code Review has always been OpenSource and Free and always it will be.

We have all benefited from the dedication and passion of the team of 600+ Contributors that every day spend their time innovating and improving the code. Thanks to all these people, we do have a world-class Code Review tool that over 25,000 developers are using every day.

For over five years, GerritHub.io has been on-line with NO-Ads, NO Premium plans. Many important Companies such as Intel and RedHat, and OpenSource projects use GerritHub.io every single days for their cooperation and daily reviews. See below some of the most active ones:

Time to say “Thank you Shawn”

Shawn Pearce, the project founder of Gerrit Code Review, died two days ago, leaving a loving wife and his children behind. In many ways, Shawn’s daily work has been put continuously in the software that keeps GerritHub.io alive every day.

It is about time to pay a tribute to Shawn dedication and make his dream to become true: giving the support and help to his family in this difficult moment.

From today, you will see a “MAKE A DONATION” button on every page of GerritHub.io that points to the “Shawn Pearce Memorial Fund“, a fund dedicated to raise the money for his family.

Spreading the word in the OpenSource communities

The news of Shawn Pearce death has gone through just a few mailing list (Git, JGit and Repo-Discuss) and I am sure that many of the people using Gerrit Code Review may not be aware of it.

Share this post, start using GerritHub.io on your OpenSource project and MAKE A DONATION to Shawn’s family.

Giving to Shawn’s family and his children a future, is the most concrete way to say “Thank you for having created Gerrit Code Review”.

 

Shawn Pearce: a true leader

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Shawn Pearce Memorial Fund

Shawn Pearce was the founder of JGit and Gerrit Code Review OpenSource projects. I am truly honored to have worked with him on the same project, even if we were sitting on the opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean and working in offices with different company names.

Many times people talk about real leaders, but having known someone like Shawn for over eight years makes a big difference. We both started with the same ideas back in 2008 even before meeting each other. Shawn had the goal of making Git scalable for its adoption in the Android OpenSource project and started by rewriting the Rietvield project in pure Java, while I had the purpose of extending the use of Git version control to large Enterprises in the world, with the GitEnterprise.com service.

Embracing ideas

We first met face-to-face in 2011 at the GitTogether in Mountain View CA at Googleplex. Shawn was the initiator of this famous “unconference.” It was an incubator of ideas and creating minds that were spending time together to exchange and enrich each one experience with new revolutionary concepts.

I was new, and I did not know anyone from the project. My ideas were very different from whatever discussed by the people in the room. Then I stood up and proposed to change the architecture of the project and make it fully pluggable, inspired by the experience and success of Jenkins CI.

Shawn did not have a clue who I was, where I was coming from, what was my experience or my working history: he just answered “yeah, that makes sense. Would you like to come and help us?”. And so I did and we worked together for a week where my journey with Shawn all started.

Inspiring people

What I liked about Shawn was his unique style of leading the project. He never announced or presented himself with glamour at the conferences, but everyone knew who he was and when he entered the room always captured the interest and attention of everyone.

The passion of talking about the challenges he was facing with the project itself and always pushing the boundaries of what could be achieved was contagious. He never said to the people what to do and still left everyone to make their mistakes to learn and improve.

Shawn was the seed that made the project grow far beyond its initial size and scope. He was able to take promising young people like Dave Borowitz, who started just a year before as an intern at Google and let him rewrite the entire backend to implement NoteDb.

Humanity first

fullsizeoutput_4.jpg

Shawn was bright and genius, but what inspired me most of all was his passion for his children and his lovely family. He was used to having his son coming over the weekend to our Hackathons as well and be close to his dad. He merged his family life with his daily work and passion. The best moment I remember was when we had a “hacking barbecue” at his new house in San Jose facing the beautiful hills at sunset, with Noah playing in the garden and hugging his loving dad.

He always looked at combining the needs of his family and the presence and duties of the Gerrit project, which remembered everyone that people are the most critical part of it.

Dedication

ShawnPearce.Commits.Analytics.png

The loss of Shawn was for a lot of people unexpected: he kept on posting code and feedback on the mailing lists until his very last days. He implemented brand-new support for OpenSSH in Gerrit back in November 2017 and kept in touch with the community and contributors until Christmas. His last commit was on the 3rd of January 2018, always committed until the very end of his life.

commit ea974d725ed1d5d5ffa1461bef7986168819dee3
Merge: e650e06 bd42cc7
Author: Shawn Pearce <sop@google.com>

Date:   Wed Jan 3 01:06:03 2018 +0000
    Merge "Prolog cookbook: attribute success to uploader, not author"

He never disclosed publicly his illness and how severe it was. He lived his life with the best of his ideas and passions till the very end, with his family, his project and all the things he loved the most.

Shawn Legacy

When great leaders like Shawn are leaving, there is always the danger to leave a void. I believe it is not possible to replace Shawn because he was a genuinely unique leader in its style and passion. What he has created, however, is a vibrant and healthy community that is out there and will continue with the values that he taught us with his professional and personal inspiring life.

What Shawn has created he defined a “healthy live project” which will be able to continue beyond his life and our existence. See below the 10 years of the project in numbers.

GerritCodeReview.numbers.png

Gratitude

We are all grateful for Shawn has done to us and all the future contributors and adopters of Git, JGit and the Gerrit Code Review.

I am a lucky person to have known and worked with such an inspiring leader. Thanks, Shawn.