Category Archives: hackathon

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

Gerrit Hackathon is back to London

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After two years of remote events and three COVID-19 waves, we are finally back for a new face-to-face hackathon, talking about the future of Gerrit Code Review and coding new and innovative solutions for making Gerrit better, faster and more scalable.

Dates and schedule

The Gerrit hackathon will start on the 9th of May at 9:00 AM for five consecutive days, and will have a daily schedule from 9:00 AM to 7:00 PM BST, with networking and catch-up in the evenings.

For the remote attendees on the US/Pacific time-zone, the schedule will be daily between 7:00 AM to 11:00 AM PDT, which allows 4h of remote interaction with the hackathon in London.

Who is invited to attend the hackathon?

As with every Gerrit hackathon, we have a restricted audience: Gerrit maintainers and contributors are invited to join. We have 10 seats available on-site and 15 seats available remotely, which would allow plenty of people to collaborate and discuss.

The “Alphabet” meeting room of the hackathon

To register to the Gerrit hackathon, add your name and role (“Gerrit Contributor” or “Gerrit Maintainer”) to the attendees sheet. All Gerrit maintainers have edit permissions to the document whilst all other contributors can request permission to edit if they are willing to attend.

Where is the hackathon taking place?

GerritForge will host the Gerrit Hackathon at Huckletree West, Mediaworks, 191 Wood Ln, London W12 7FP. We will be staying at the “Alphabet” meeting room, with a dedicated 10-seats and roundtable, a full-size wall-mounted whiteboard and a permanent online connection and wall-attached screen to interact with all the other remote attendees.

Huckletree West

Huckletree is a creative workspace in West London, based in the heart of White City Place, a thriving new business and cultural district. Alongside the neighboring BBC Studios, Net A Porter Group, and RCA School of Communication, Huckletree West is part of a bold new chapter in the rich creative history of the neighborhood.

For all remote attendees, there will be the ability to connect remotely and interact with the rest of the team on-site during the hackathon hours.

White City and local accommodations

Huckletree West is close to the WestField Shopping Centre in White City, which includes 289 stores, 95 restaurants and Cinemas with 20 screens and almost 3,000 seats.

White City has excellent connections to all parts of London through the London Underground network (Central, Hammersmith&City and Circle lines) and Overground trains, which allow to reach all other parts of the city.

WestField shopping centre – White City

You can look for any Hotel or other accommodation (B&B or Hostels) in other part of London which is covered by the London Underground connections. However, if you are willing to stay local, there are many choices of Hotels and B&B starting from ￡80/night. See below a list of accommodations nearby White City:

Travelling to the hackathon

By airplane: from London Heathrow terminals, take the Piccadilly Line to Central London till Hammersmith, then take the Hammersmith&City line (station is across the street) until Wood Lane station. From London Stansted, take the Stansted Express train to Liverpool Street station and then the Circle Line to Hammersmith until the Wood Lane station.

By train: from the Eurostar Terminal at St. Pancras International, take the Hammersmith&City or Circle line to Edgware Road until the Wood Lane station.

Taxi: you can use the London Black Cab as well as other cheaper alternatives such as Uber or local minicabs companies.

From the Wood Lane station, there is a 6 minutes walk to reach Huckletree West, located in the MediaWorks building on the ground floor.

Route from Wood Lane Station to Huckletree West

Brexit restrictions

The UK has left the European Union the 1st of January 2021, all travellers from EU needs to follow the new rules for business trips. You can check if you need a VISA using the UK Government site and what is the required documentation and insurance required to show at the UK Border.

COVID-19 restrictions

The UK is set to end all COVID-19 restrictions by March 2022, which means there aren’t any vaccination or testing requirements for the attendees to the hackathon. We advise everyone attending face-to-face to take extra precautions and take a lateral-flow test (LFT) or antigen test before traveling to the hackathon, even though it is not required by law or regulations.

Please note that face covering are still mandatory whilst travelling by airplane, train or underground and during taxi rides.

We are excited to meet again the community of Gerrit Code Review maintainers and contributors after so many months. Come and join us in London this year and we can innovate again and help shaping the future of the Gerrit project, together.

Luca Milanesio, GerritForge
Gerrit Code Review Maintainer
Gerrit Code Review Release Manager
Member of the Engineering Steering Committee of the Gerrit Code Review Open-Source project

Summary of the Gerrit User Summit & Hackathon in Sunnyvale

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sunnyvale-gerritforge-live.jpg

After months of reviews and contributions by different speakers and attendees, the summary of the last Gerrit User Summit & Hackathon in Sunnyvale CA has been published on the Gerrit Code Review News page.

High-performance Summit in numbers

The Gerrit User Summit 2019 has ended, with highest score of achievements
in the history of the 11 years of the entire Gerrit open-source project:

  • Two dates and locations in a 12-months period: Gothenburg (Sweden) and
    Sunnyvale (California).
  • Four Gerrit releases delivered: v2.15.16, v2.16.11, v3.0.2, v3.1.0
  • 127 people registered across the two locations,
    87 people attended on-site (70% turnout) and 38 people followed the event
    remotely at different times using the live streaming coverage
    provided by GerritForge.
  • 373 changes merged (204 in Gothenburg, 169 in Sunnyvale).
  • 32 developers attended the Hackathons, 8 of them have never contributed or
    attended an event before.
  • The highest performing version of Gerrit v3.1.0 released, with over
    2x git and REST-API performance compared to v3.0.x.
  • 22 talks presented across Gothenburg and Sunnyvale, with 6 new speakers
    that have never presented before at the Summit.

The performance of the Summit is yet again another evidence of the continuous
growth of the community and the increased synergies with the JGit, OpenStack/Zuul
and the Tuleap open-source projects.

Read the full Summit and Hackathon summary on the Gerrit Code Review web-site.

Gerrit User Summit at Volvo Cars

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gerrit-user-summit-volvo-cars

The 2019 is a year of the Summit innovations

The Gerrit User Summit 2019 can definitely be defined as truly innovative in its format and audience.

For the first time in the Gerrit history, the Summit is split into two parts. Volvo Cars have hosted the first in Gothenburg (Sweden) while the second will take place from the 11th to the 17th of November at GerritForge Inc. HQ in Sunnyvale, CA (USA).

The Summit has been repeated on both sides of the Atlantic: the European and US communities come from different background and have different needs. The Gerrit Code Review Community is global and is willing to share experiences and receive feedback from both sides.

A truly open Gerrit Hackathon

We are also innovating on the Hackathon perspective, with three new elements:

  1. The Hackathon is now open to everyone, including the people that have never contributed to Gerrit before. Experienced maintainers have paired with newbies to guide through the very first contributions.
  2. The Hackathon at Volvo Cars has been 100% focused in triaging the massive backlog of open issues and fixing as many bugs as possible for the latest three supported branches: stable-3.0, stable-2.16 and stable-2.15.
  3. The OpenStack and Gerrit communities finally have met and started talking and interacting more closely.

Read the full story on gerritcodereview.com/news.html

The full summary of the event has been published on the Gerrit Code Review project news, read what happened in Gothenburg and, if you are in the USA, do not miss the next forthcoming Gerrit User Summit USA in Sunnyvale.

Hurry up as the seats are running out, REGISTER NOW to avoid missing the event.

Luca Milanesio (GerritForge Ltd)
Gerrit Maintainer, Release Manager, ESC member

Gerrit User Summit 2019

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gothenburg-sunnyvale

The Gerrit User Summit 2019 is approaching fast, with new exciting features and a brand-new Gerrit v3.0 release to present and discuss together.

The event is FREE but you need to register in advance for the Gerrit User Summit 2019 on Eventbrite.

One Summit, two events

The Gerrit User Summit & Hackathon is composed of two different events and locations, one in Sweden (Europe), hosted and sponsored by Volvo Cars, and another in California (USA) in the new GerritForge Inc. HQ. Having two separate events in two different quarters will allow most of the community around the globe to attend and share their experience and ideas.

Hackathon open to new contributors

The first part of the event is a 5-days Hackathon reserved for the current Gerrit contributors and maintainers plus anyone that is willing to start contributing to the platform. Differently, from the previous years, the community is now welcome even people that have not contributed to Gerrit before but they are willing to do so.

It is a fantastic opportunity for people to join, work side-by-side and pair with the Gerrit maintainers for a whole week. It can be a unique opportunity to implement the features that you always wanted to see in Gerrit and learning how we develop and review our changes.

The Summit

The usual 2-days Users Summit after the Hackathon is opened to all the members of the community or who is willing to adopt Gerrit Code Review in their development process in the near future.

This year there are a number of exciting news:

  • The introduction of an official Gerrit Community Process with an Engineering Steering Committee and Community Managers
  • Gerrit v3.0 and the full migration to NoteDb and PolyGerrit
  • The multi-site plugin goes OpenSource for allowing anyone to run multiple masters on different sites

The full schedule of the event is available on the Gerrit User Summit 2019 site.

Proposing a new talk

More talks and customer stories are scheduled and, if you have something to tell to the rest of the community, you can submit your talk by creating a change and push to Gerrit Summit 2019 repository:

  1. Open the repository commands age at https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/admin/repos/summit/2019,commands
  2. Click on “CREATE CHANGE”
  3. Select “master” branch, put your description and create the new change
  4. Click on “Edit” on the top-right of the page
  5. Click on “Open” in the mid toolbar and open the page you would like to edit.

For proposing a new session, you need to add one file with the name of your talk into the sessions folder, using the template.md as an example.

Where and when

Volvo Cars HQ at their HQ in Gothenburg (Sweden)

  • 24-28th August 2019 – Gerrit Hackathon Europe
  • 29-30th August 2019 – Gerrit User Summit Europe

GerritForge Inc HQ in Sunnyvale CA (USA)

  • 11-15th November 2019 – Gerrit Hackathon USA
  • 16-17th November 2019 – Gerrit User Summit USA

Thanks to our sponsors

I would like to thank Volvo Cars and Nicholas Mucci for hosting, sponsoring and organizing the Gerrit User Summit Europe in Gothenburg (Sweden) and GerritForge for hosting and sponsoring the events in both Europe and the USA in Sunnyvale CA (USA).

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

 

 

 

 

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 2018

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The Gerrit User Summit 2018 has ended. It has been a truly memorable event and with strong emotions, gratitude and celebration of the success of the Gerrit OpenSource project.

During the hackathon, some major events happened:

  • The release of Gerrit v2.16
  • Support for Kubernetes
  • New plugins contributed by Qualcomm
  • The announcement of a new maintainer, Marco Miller from Ericsson, congrats!

Hackathon and Gerrit v2.16

The hackathon took place at SAP (2 days) and Cloudera (1 day) in Palo Alto with the main focus of completing the migration to PolyGerrit and cut the v2.16 release. Three major milestones of the Gerrit project:

  1. PolyGerrit as default UI for Gerrit Code Review.
  2. Migration of the groups to NoteDb
  3. Support of the Git protocol v2

With regards to the achievement #1, during the hackathon, the commit for removing all the GWT related code from Gerrit master has been finally merged.

PolyGerrit as default Gerrit Code Review UI

The PolyGerrit Team has reached the summit of the long and troubled journey of getting rid of the outdated and Gerrit GWT UI. Kasper and Logan (Google) burned every single bit of their development energy to fix, implement and fill all the remaining gaps in the user journeys.

On Gerrit v2.16, PolyGerrit UI is the default and standard way of interacting with Gerrit Code Review. GWT is still there for allowing people to smoothly adapt to the new interface. However, the next forthcoming version of Gerrit v3.0 will not contain anymore any reference to the old UI. People will still have a few more months to adapt and, from the feedback received on GerritHub.io, they seem to not miss the GWT interface at all.

Well done to the entire PolyGerrit Team, starting from Andrew who kicked off the project back in 2015 to Wyatt, Becky, Victor, Kasper and Logan who brought it up to the usability and portability to multiple devices as it is today. Thanks to their amazing effort, we can all interact with Gerrit Code Review wherever and whenever we want, without losing speed and effectiveness.

Migration of Gerrit groups to NoteDb

One more step towards the complete elimination of ReviewDb has been achieved in Gerrit v2.16: there isn’t anymore any mutable data in the leftover of the (in)famous Gerrit DB. The new version includes a new git repository (All-Groups) which contains all the information related to the groups create through the Gerrit UI.

What’s left in ReviewDb? Not much: only the schema version. When you install Gerrit it is populated with a single row and a single column with the value ‘170’ and will never change. There is no need to share it across master or slaves: just set database.type = h2 and forget about it.

Git protocol v2

It is a major achievement of Gerrit v2.16 as the Git wire protocol v2 solves the performance problems of large repositories: the refs filtering during the advertisement phase.

In a nutshell, if you were fetching a single from a repository with 500k refs, the server would have sent a huge payload of all refs with the associated SHA1s even if at the end of the day you wanted only to fetch a single one. The delay could have been of several seconds if not minutes, which is quite relevant if you are fetching all the times, like in a CI/CD pipeline.

Git protocol v2 reduced the refs advertisement phase by over 70%, which makes Gerrit v2.16 so appealing that you may want to place in the top 5 tasks of your backlog.

Farewell to GWT UI code

Even though Gerrit v2.16 keeps the ability to display the old-fashioned GWT Gerrit UI, the code has been definitely removed on the Gerrit master branch, which will the base for Gerrit v3.0 that will be released in Spring 2019.

This is a memorable moment because represents the final act of making PolyGerrit UI the unified user-experience of Gerrit moving forward.

Data and Insights of the Hackathon

This year the event has been truly focused as well on the analytics side of the Code Review and the entire CI/CD pipeline: was it possibly the location, Cloudera, the world leader in OpenSource BigData and Analytics, giving the right vibrations? Possibly, yes.

Numbers

Over 20 people have attended the Hackathon on-site and, for the first time, remotely via video-conference, from companies and countries all around the world:

  1. Google (USA and Germany)
  2. CollabNet (Japan and Germany)
  3. GerritForge (UK, Ireland, Italy, and Germany)
  4. SAP (Germany)
  5. Qualcomm (USA)
  6. Ericsson (Canada)
  7. Wikimedia Foundation (UK)

Over 300+ changes have been uploaded and 244 of them have been already merged.

They have been working on 44 projects, showing how diverse is today the universe of Gerrit Code Review and its associated plugins and integrations.

Gerrit DevOps Analytics

GerritForge has been hacking on improving the platform that powers the Gerrit Code Review Analytics Platform which has been serving the community for many years.

For the first time, thanks to the introduction of branch-level analytics, the community had data automatically crunched in near-real time of what was happening on the master branch and on the on-going stable 2.16 release.

As a matter of fact, the numbers mentioned before are directly coming from Gerrit DevOps Analytics. Thanks again GerritForge for innovating and improving the Gerrit Code Review platform.

Gerrit Analytics Wizard

For the first time, two new contributors from GerritForge, Tony and Ponch, finalized and demoed a new plugin called ‘analytics-wizard’ that allows anyone with a Gerrit server to set up a mini-version of the Gerrit DevOps Analytics, using Docker, ElasticSearch, and Kibana.

Two new plugins: batch and tasks

Qualcomm has released two new plugins based on their experience of running complex pipelines on a multi-master Gerrit setup. The majority of the code was developed in-house before the hackathon. However, the final release and announced happened this week and I am sure it will allow many other companies to benefit from their experience of validating complex multi-repo changes on a large scale CI system.

Batch

This plugin provides a mechanism for building and previewing sets of proposed updates to multiple projects/refs that should be applied in a batch. These updates are built with Gerrit changes.

Task

The plugin provides a mechanism to manage tasks which need to be performed on changes along with a way to expose and query this information. Tasks are organized hierarchically, and task definitions use Gerrit queries to define which changes each task applies to, and how to define the status criteria for each task. An important use case of the task plugin is to have a common place for CI systems to define which changes they will operate on, and when they will do so.

Gerrit on Kubernetes from SAP and GerritForge

Luke (GerritForge), Matthias (SAP) and Thomas (SAP remotely from Germany) worked on a PoC for supporting Kubernetes deployments.

Last year SAP started using containerized slaves and decided to go cloud native and base our future Gerrit deployments on Kubernetes and leverage project Gardener to support multiple cloud providers. Matthias worked with Thomas to prepare a PoC and a demo the current work in progress and discuss plans moving forward.

The code has been published to the new k8s-gerrit repository and new commits will be subject to the standard Gerrit Code Review process.

Luke prepared an example of Gerrit v2.15 deployment in Kubernetes (single master at the moment) with shared storage and showed how to upgrade easily by leveraging Helm Charts deployments through Tiler.

Even though the two projects started in parallel, they agreed to cooperate and work together with the community to have a unified Kubernetes deployment code-base for installing and upgrading multi-master Gerrit setups. This is definitely an area where we will see very interesting developments very soon.

What about the Summit?

The talks of the summit have been very interesting this year and have covered mostly three main topics: Gerrit roadmap and scalability, sharing of real-life migrations to Gerrit v2.14 and v2.15 and, as previously mentioned, Data Analytics & Insights including research work on using machine-learning for supporting the Code Review process.

All the talks are getting published as we speak on each talk of the Gerrit User Summit Schedule.

All the talks have been recorded and will be published within the next few weeks on the GerritForge TV YouTube channel.

More blog posts will follow with more background on each talk, stay tuned and watch this space to know more about what has been presented and announced at the Summit.

Proposals for the next Gerrit User Summit 2019

The overall feedback on the summit has been very positive, including the Birthday Party organized and sponsored by GerritForge for the 10th anniversary of the Gerrit Code Review project.

During the final closing keynote, many interesting proposals have been made:

  • Gerrit users’ wish-list session.
    Any Gerrit user can feed the backlog of new feature proposing what they will like to see implemented
  • Gerrit plugin hackathon.
    Learn how to implement Gerrit plugin and trying to put together in one or two days something useful using any of the programming languages they wish, including Java, Groovy, Scala or anything else.

More details will come as soon as the closing keynote session recording will be published.

Remembering Shawn Pearce and his legacy

Dave Borowitz, the leader of the Gerrit Code Review project, made a thoughtful and touching speech about Shawn Pearce, the father of the Gerrit 2, who started the project exactly 10 years ago. The cake, the hackathon, the summit, and the v2.16 release have been fully dedicated to his memory as appreciation for his humanity and passion for OpenSource.

Thanks, Shawn. We will continue on your legacy and improve the Gerrit Code Review platform as you would have wanted us to do.

 

 

 

Gerrit User Summit: only two weeks away

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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

 

 

 

 

Gerrit User Summit 2017 – Sold Out

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The Gerrit User Summit 2017 this year is entirely SOLD OUT, a fantastic result and huge audience increment from last year, coming from 14 different countries.

It is essential for a healthy OpenSource project having a diverse and growing community of users that assures longevity and organic growth of features and ideas.

See you at CodeNode on Monday 2nd of October 8:00 AM and help shape the future of Gerrit Code Review, growing and thriving in the ecosystem of Git Code Review tools.

Gerrit User Summit 2017, 2-3 Oct, London

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New and exciting features are coming for this year Gerrit User Summit, with the launch of Ver. 2.15, NoteDb, high-availability, multi-master and much more.

The Summit will take place for the very first time in Europe, London, the location chosen by the community after a public consultation, the 2nd and 3rd of October at CodeNode (Skills Matter).

There are still a few places available but hurry up and register now at https://gerritusersummit.eventbrite.com.

See below an overview of the topics that will be presented and discussed during the User Summit.

What’s new in Gerrit 2.14.x.

Gerrit v2.14 was released during the last Hackathon in April and has gone through three patch releases. David Pursehouse from CollabNet will give an overview of the new features introduced which would be highly beneficial for all of those who haven’t migrated yet.

Gerrit at Google: Multi-master, Mutli-tenant.

Google is the founder, main contributor and possibly the most advanced user of the Gerrit Code Review: learning from their experience is a unique opportunity to learn and being able to leverage and use the tool at its best.

Patrick Hiesel from Google will go through the insights of their Gerrit Code Review architecture and will provide some of their metrics of scale. In addition to that, he will present some findings from the recent switch of their load-balancing infrastructure and the associated pitfalls encountered.

Google is possibly the only one in the world using Gerrit in a multi-tenant setup, having a unique multi-master installation that serves a constellation of domains and projects, including huge and familiar ones like Android and Chromium.

Standing “on the shoulders of giants” like Google helps a lot in preventing scalability issues as the audience and adoption of Gerrit Code Review grows in large companies: being part of the audience in the talk is a unique opportunity to learn and ask questions directly to the maintainers of their infrastructure.

PolyGerrit: a new UX experience for Gerrit Code Review

Google has invested a lot in reinventing and reengineering the user interface of Gerrit Code Review, which remained mostly unchanged for almost a decade. A new team has been put together in their San Francisco offices with experienced UX developers that leveraged the new Polymer framework of web components.

The result is PolyGerrit, a modern web UX which provides an unprecedented browsing speed and flexible rendering across different devices, including mobile and tablets.

The PolyGerrit Team will be presenting the findings of their user-experience research and show some of the features and insights of the new UX.

Gerrit CI and keeping logs forever.

Gerrit Code Review itself is a large project, involving over 300 developers across the globe and using the most advanced DevOps practices. The CI/CD pipeline has been provided and managed by GerritForge on the https://gerrit-ci.gerritforge.com and Luca Milanesio from GerritForge will present the latest improvements in the pipeline plus an interesting way of collecting and reusing the logs.

Leveraging the logs for identifying the bottlenecks of the CI/CD pipeline is the way to drive improvement. GerritForge leveraged the expertise of his engineers to harvest and organize data and will give it back to the community as powerful dashboards.

Beyond Gerrit.

Gerrit is great. However, it is also quite an important part of a bigger ALM process. Jacek Centkowski from CollabNet will describe how multiple tools can be unified under a single TeamForge umbrella and what are the immediate benefits of it.

What’s coming in Gerrit 2.15

After only four months, we are already close to the v2.15 of Gerrit Code Review, which would be possibly the last one before the step to the v3.0.

Dave Borowitz from Google, principal maintainer of the Gerrit Code Review project, will go through the new features of v2.15 and possibly give a glimpse in what to expect from v3.0.

Mining Gerrit Data to Study Contentious Reviews and Community Evolution

Gerrit Code Review is much more than a tool, it is a way for people working together in companies that are large and mostly distributed across the globe.

Shane McIntosh from McGill University has been running a research lab on this topic. The Software REBELs—a research lab at McGill University—mine code review data to study topics like the impact that code review practices have on software release and design quality. Our more recent work mines code review data to study the reviewing process itself. In this talk, I will describe the results of two empirical studies of data that we collected from the Gerrit instances of the OpenStack project. The first study aims to understand the reviews where reviewers disagree about a patch. The second study follows how the concerns that reviewers raise evolve as the OpenStack community ages and individual reviews accrue experience.

Gerrit Analytics: dashboards, networks, KPI

Gerrit has always been lacking major code analytics features compared to other Git Server tools like GitBlit or GitLab. GerritForge Ltd is filling the gap and adds one important asset to the Gerrit Code Review platform: code review analytics.

We need to harvest and unify the logs and events coming from the different components of the CI/CD pipeline by putting at the center of it the people and teams that are building and discussing the code on Gerrit. The resulting data-lake of information can be later analyzed and correlated to calculate the cycle time of the entire pipeline.

Luca Milanesio from GerritForge will show the new analytics dashboards that are going to be published and provided back to the Team that is developing the Gerrit Code Review project as a precious contribution to the community.

How to extend Gerrit using Scripting Plugins

Gerrit Code Review has a robust set of API that can be used to extend its functionalities and provide a more integrated development workflow for the Teams.

Luca Milanesio from GerritForge will present how to use different scripting tools to extend the capabilities of Gerrit without the need of developing and building a plugin, using Jython, Groovy and Scala.

A new simpler but powerful Gerrit Jenkins plugin

Gerrit Code Review is an essential part of a larger CI/CD pipeline. Most of the times it is used in conjunction with Jenkins, the most popular OpenSource Continuous Integration and Delivery tool.

The integration between Gerrit and Jenkins (Gerrit Trigger Plugin) was developed back in 2010 at Sony and since then has been extended and adopted in thousands of Jenkins installations. However, Jenkins has evolved too and has now a brand new concept and definition of multi-branch pipeline which struggles to be seamlessly integrated with the current Gerrit Trigger Plugin.

Luca Milanesio from GerritForge will present a brand new plugin based on the new Jenkins branch discovery API which works seamlessly with Jenkins multi-branch pipelines and provides a simpler interface with Gerrit by leveraging the new WebHooks.

Diffy with enterprise grade

Since 2012 CollabNet has been working on improving Gerrit integration with TeamForge. Many features have been created to satisfy the needs of enterprise customers. Eryk Szymanski from CollabNet will present features like RBAC, history protection, Git style notifications, quality gates, pull request and code browser which have been implemented on top of vanilla Gerrit.

Q&A with the maintainers

Have you ever wondered why something is working in a certain way? Have you ever wanted to explain any complaint about some parts of Gerrit? Would you give your congratulation to the people that made this project? Would you like to make a feature request or propose new ideas?

This is the moment where you can speak directly face-to-face to the people that are building this project every single day, the Gerrit maintainers.

The event is free for everyone, thanks to the contribution of our sponsors, CollabNet Inc, GerritForge Ltd and Skills Matter Ltd.

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