Dear fellow Gerrit User, We are pleased to announce that GerritForge will be organizing this year’s Gerrit User Summit and Hackathon in hybrid mode: face-to-face and online.
Gerrit User Summit is the event that brings together Gerrit admins, developers, practitioners, and the whole community, in one place, providing attendees with the opportunity to learn, explore, network face-to-face, and help shape the future of Gerrit development and solutions.
After two years of remote meetings and virtual conferences, this year, we are back face-to-face at CodeNode in the heart of the vibrant City of London.
The dates will be: Nov 7th to 9th – Hackathon Nov 10th to 11th – User Summit
Shortly we will be publishing the full schedule and logistics for the event. I look forward to meeting all the community’s friends, face-to-face or virtually, again during the Hackathon & Summit.
Thanks for being a part of the Gerrit community, and we look forward to seeing you in November.
Luca Milanesio Maintainer, member of the Engineering Steering Committee, and Gerrit Code Review Release Manager
Yet another year has passed for the Gerrit Code Review project with many challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, new exciting releases, and the most popular Gerrit User Summit with the largest audience ever in its 12 years of history.
2021 in numbers
93 registered attendees to the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021, connecting from 56 companies over 17 countries, 14 talks showcased by 15 presenters over 2 days
35 releases of which 2 major versions (v3.4.0 and v3.5.0.1) and 33 patches
107 contributors from 32 organizations, merging 4763 changes to 84 projects
The Gerrit Code Review community has shown resiliency during these difficult times, with outstanding participation in the events organized during the year, all remote and lacking the much-needed face-to-face interaction.
2021 vs. 2020 trends
Commits: -26%
Projects: -16%
Contributors: -30%
Companies: -41%
Average changes/contributor: +10%
The engagement has paid its toll after two years of pandemics with fewer organizations willing to invest time in contributing to Gerrit, possibly also impacted by the uncertainty of the future. 2021 has also been the first whole year of the project without David Pursehouse, one of the Gerrit project’s top #3 contributors. He was used to contributing 1.5k changes per year, which would alone easily justify the drop observed.
On the bright side, the contributors that continued over the year 2021 have shown an increased commitment as the number of active projects and commits has dropped less than the contributors, increasing the change/contributor rate compared to 2020.
Major organisations contributing to Gerrit in 2021
Google is confirmed to be the leading force of the Gerrit Code Review project, with over 62% of the changes merged, while GerritForge continues to be the #1 top contributor from the rest of the community. There are a couple of pleasant special surprises from the contributors.
Wikimedia Foundation confirmed to be the #2 top contributor from the community, all provided by Paladox who has been awarded Gerrit Maintainer in November.
SAP continues to be a strong contributor, just below Wikimedia Foundation, with Thomas being awarded Gerrit Maintainer in November.
Qualcomm is back on the shortlist of the top maintainers, with many new names in the list of contributors, well done!
The first surprise is that the code-owners, the emerging star of the Gerrit plugins, received a massive investment of effort from Edwin (Google), who contributed 89% of the changes to it. The code-owners plugin has also been presented at the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 and attracted the community’s attention.
The second surprise is the decline in contributions in the jgit project during the past two years: from 820 changes/year is now down to 374 changes in 2021.
Task is now the #2 plugin project in terms of merged changes in 2021. Qualcomm keeps the project’s full ownership with 98.9% of changes in 2021.
GerritForge confirm their commitment to improving Gerrit Multi-Site, as its plugin is the #3 in terms of changes merged in 2021.
Aws-gerrit is a relatively new project, presented less than two years ago and contributed by GerritForge, who contributed over 99% of the changes. It confirms to be a very active project that has helped the Gerrit Code Review open-source project deploy and test well-known “recipes” of infrastructure setups and see how Gerrit performs and works on those. Many bugs have been detected before the release and identified by the aws-gerrit project and CI integration.
The cache-chroniclemap module confirms to be very active in 2021, with 40 changes all provided by GerritForge. This relatively new module allows existing Gerrit setups to increase the overall performance of all persistent caches, which are vital in reducing the REST-API latency across all Gerrit features.
The checks plugin was deprecated back in 2020. However, it still shows significant changes and investment from Google in supporting the new Gerrit checks-API and UI. However, the rate of contributions is in stiff decline, down from the 324 changes in 2019 when it was still an actively developed project.
The Gerrit Code Review community abandoned the idea of a face-to-face event in 2021 because of the continued global pandemic of COVID-19. Instead, there were two separate virtual events for sharing the news of what is happening on the platform and the expectations from the community.
Virtual Gerrit Contributors’ Summit – 9th of June
The summit was organized by the Gerrit Community Managers and had an amazing audience amongst the contributors. The presentations showed what different teams are working on and reported into the summit notes:
It was the first experiment of an entirely Virtual User Summit of the Gerrit Code Review project history. The challenges were multiple, including the limitations of allowing up to 100s of attendees, shortening the overall time to 3h x 2 days, and still allowing some interactions between the audience and the presenters. After two years of silence, we have finally received some user stories of using Gerrit in the wild.
The Summit has received vast overall positive feedback and rated 7.9/10, making it a fantastic achievement. The quality and interest of the talks were scored even higher, reaching 8.2/10.
Marcin (GerritForge) showed the work done in implementing a brand-new plugin that promises msec latencies for replicating repositories 1000x faster than the current replication plugin.
It was definitely a lot of information and sharing, which showed that the Gerrit Code Review open-source project is alive and active more than ever.
Gerrit features highlights in 2021
Gerrit Code Review has major innovations developed and decisions made over 2021. See below a short recap of the ones that represent a turning point in the evolution of the Gerrit open-source project. Some of them are considered breaking changes and, therefore, need careful analysis and a planned upgrade path.
Speed up of Gerrit upgrade from v2.7 to the latest version
2021 has seen a significant increase in the cooperation and contributions of Qualcomm to the rest of the Gerrit Code Review community, focussed on the speed-up of the Gerrit upgrade process from v2.7 to v3.5. The contributions and cooperation have brought many improvements to JGit and Gerrit and will allow many more companies to migrate faster and smoother than ever before.
JSch SSH library is completed removed from Gerrit Code Review
The quirks and obsolescence of the JSch library has cursed Gerrit’s destiny for years. Thanks to Thomas Wolf (Paranor) JGit moved away from it and rebuilt all its Git/SSH stack on top of Apache Mina. That has allowed to remove the JSch library from the Gerrit dependencies and used the Apache Mina SSHD client stack instead.
Gerrit cannot include or require any commercial product not released under one of the open-source licenses allowed by the project. The ElasticSearch backend has not been widely used in the community anyway, based on a recent survey sent to the community therefore the ESC decided on the 3rd of November that the ElasticSearch backend will be removed from Gerrit core and moved into a libModule.
Submit Requirements waving goodbye to Prolog
The Gerrit Code Review project does not use anymore Prolog rules for the submit rules of the project from the 16th of December. The support for Prolog-less submit rules is now mature and it will be part of the forthcoming v3.6 release in 2022.
What’s coming in 2022?
The future of Gerrit Code Review is bright and full of innovative ideas and improvements on the overall development and CI/CD lifecycle. With the forced remote working of millions of developers worldwide, more and more companies are looking on how to make remote interactions more useful and fruitful, reducing frictions and making the workflow smoother and faster more than ever.
Stay tuned and keep on using and contributing to Gerrit Code Review, one of the most innovative and productive platforms for code review and collaboration.
The Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 was held online to allow most of the community around the globe to attend and share their experience and ideas and avoid the problems with the traveling restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite the limitations of the remote format, the interest and attendance to the Virtual User Summit has been outstanding, confirming the resiliency of the community and the will to inform and ask questions, share opinions and discuss no matter the difficulties and challenges.
See below some of the numbers of the Summit:
92 registered attendees, with 71 of them showing up at at least one of the two dates (77% of attendance)
17 countries connected (Austria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Ukraine, UK, USA)
56 companies
14 sessions in 2 days
15 presenters
Despite the limitations of the remote interaction and the hours, this has been the largest User Summit ever, terrific news for the whole community.
What do people think about the Summit?
All the 71 attendees have received a Survey about the Summit, 24 of them have provided their feedback.
Q1: How would you rate the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021 edition? The average rating has been 7.9 over 10, with the 45% rating 9 to 10 points out of 10.
Q2: What was your main objective in attending the Summit? Most responses were around “learning about Gerrit’s new features and initiatives” and “getting in touch with the community and its users”.
Q3: Do you consider to have achieved the objective? 88% of the people said “yes”, which seems consistent with the 7.9/10 overall rating of the Summit.
Q4: If your answer was “no”, what is the aspect that was not achieved? All of them expressed concerns about the inability to have a two-way direct with the other users at the Summit, which is mainly linked to the technical difficulties and limitations of a remote webinar platform.
Q5: How satisfied are you with the quality of the presentations? The average rating has been 8.2 over 10, with the 55% rating 9 to 10 points out of 10.
Q6: Would you prefer to have your camera on during the Summit as an attendee? 53% answered no, which shows that opinions are divided on the topic of having remote face-to-face communication with such a large audience.
Q7: Would you like to have breakout rooms to interact as part of the Summit? 76% answered yes, giving good confidence of trying that approach in the next Summit, assuming that would be “virtual” again.
Q8: What would be the best way for you to interact with other attendees and speakers during the Virtual Summit? The majority of the answers were directed to the use of breakout rooms with a moderator, which matches the feedback given on Q7.
Q9: What platform would you suggest to deliver future Virtual Summits? Most people did not express preferences, while others mentioned Zoom, Google Meet, and GoToWebinar (the one used during this 2021 Summit).
Q10: What did you like the most about the 2021 Summit, and what should be improved in the subsequent Summits? Most of the people liked the content and quality of the presentations, which matches the high scores given in Q5. Also, the format of 3h per day, split into two different days, looks optimal for compatibility with the existing working day. Registration and attending the event were straightforward, and the browser-based integration with the stream of Q&A was easy. The proposals for improvements were on the following points:
Having more talks about user stories: do people use topics? What they use for CI integration for them? How people vote on changes/topics?
Having direct interactions between participants, seeing their faces and talking to them directly
More communication and advertisement of the event beforehand
More seamless transition between the webinar part and the interactive Q&A session
What’s next for 2022?
With the new Omicron-variant of COVID-19raging in the UK and the risk of global expansion in 2022, a face-to-face User Summit next year is still possible but unlikely. The huge success of the Virtual Summit format could lead us to try an improved version in 2022, trying other platforms like Zoom or Google Meet.
Many new exciting features are coming in 2022, including the release of Gerrit v3.6 and the Prolog-less Submit Requirements. We would love to see again what the community thinks about it and interact more with the real-life Gerrit Code Review users and administrators.
Thanks again to those who have participated and presented at the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021. See you next year for another exciting and more engaging get-together in 2022!
Join the Gerrit Community tomorrow and Friday from 8 am PST for everything related to the Gerrit Code Review Community.
Gerrit provides web based code review and repository management for the Git version control system. Whether you are experienced or new to Gerrit, you should know that it provides a framework you and your teams can use to review code before it becomes part of the code base. Come and take this chance to join and learn about Gerrit Code Review.
Find here the full schedule of the sessions you will have access to.
An important part of the summit are the lightning talks, ten-minute talks that intend to present research or demos and work in progress within the Gerrit Code Review.
Join Ian Gauthier, Flywheel.io who will present research performed to evaluate the extent to which historical data is an appropriate benchmark for reviewer recommendation systems. In another session Paul Jolly, CUE demonstrates how the CUE project uses GerritHub in combination with GitHub Actions for Continuous Integration and regression testing. And don’t miss out the live demo and presentation of the AWS-Gerrit project by Antonio Barone, GerritForge with the integration with AWS X-RAY, as part of the efforts to bring Gerrit to the cloud.
Click “CREATE CHANGE” button and specify the branch (master) and the headline of your talk
Click on “EDIT” button on the top-right to edit your change
Click on the “ADD/OPEN/UPLOAD” button and enter the filename for your talk (e.g. sessions/super-duper-repos.md for a talk or lightning-talks/mini-session.md for a lightning talk) upload the text for your talk by dragging the markdown text into the window.
Click the “PUBLISH EDIT” button on the top-right of the change screen
Click on the “MARK AS ACTIVE” button on the top-right of the change screen
Your talk will then be reviewed by the community and, when accepted, merged into the Gerrit User Summit 2021 site.
This year’s program will offer a keynote, six presentation sessions and seven ‘lightning’ (10-minute) talks distributed in two days, so that you can share your ideas, research, demonstrations, live demos, and network with the Gerrit Community and those interested in learning and adopting Gerrit Code Review in their development process.
Submit your presentation proposal by creating a change to the Gerrit Summit 2021 repository by following those steps:
Click “CREATE CHANGE” button and specify the branch (master) and the headline of your talk
Click on “EDIT” button on the top-right to edit your change
Click on the “ADD/OPEN/UPLOAD” button and enter the filename for your talk (e.g. sessions/super-duper-repos.md for a talk or lightning-talks/mini-session.md for a lightning talk) upload the text for your talk by dragging the markdown text into the window.
Click the “PUBLISH EDIT” button on the top-right of the change screen
Click on the “MARK AS ACTIVE” button on the top-right of the change screen
Your talk will then be reviewed by the community and, when accepted, merged into the Gerrit User Summit 2021 site.
GerritForge keeps working to improve performance using Gerrit with very large mono-repos with millions of refs, hundreds of GBs and tens of millions of objects.
On the second day of the virtual Gerrit User Summit 2021, Luca will present the work done over the past two years to overcome significant difficulties when:
Reducing the overhead of refs advertisement
Speeding-up clones by a 10x factor
Reducing the system load when accessing change notes
Increasing performance of replication
Surviving the deadly “search-for-reuse” phase during git-upload-pack
Register here to join the user summit on December 2nd and 3rd.
The Gerrit Community is happy to announce the Gerrit Virtual User Summit 2021, THE event of the year for everything related to Gerrit Code Review and the trunk-based development pipeline.
A Virtual Summit
The Gerrit User Summit 2021 will be held online only, to allow most of the community around the globe to attend and share their experience and ideas, and avoid the problems with the travelling restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The 2-day User Summit is open to all the members of the community as well as those that are willing to learn and adopt Gerrit Code Review in their development process.
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.
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.
GerritForge Blog 