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Re: [PATCH 0/2] git-candidate: git based patch tracking and review

From
RIRichard Ipsum <richard.ipsum@codethink.co.uk>
Date
Jan 6, 2016, 15:49 UTC
Message-ID
<20160106154910.GA8375@salo>
In-Reply-To
<CAD0k6qQ98ED4xLynRZdnnPX_HDHhEq5SQhNov-5cwG82pqMFGw@mail.gmail.com>
On Tue, Dec 01, 2015 at 04:00:52PM -0500, Dave Borowitz wrote:
Show 6 quoted lines
> On Tue, Dec 1, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Cc-ing dborowitz, who has been working on storing Gerrit's code review
> > information in Git instead of a separate database (e.g., see [1]).
> 
> Thanks, we actually already had a thread going that I realize only in
> retrospect did not include the git mailing list.

Thanks, we did indeed have a thread going, that probably should have been on-list. I'm also working on a little library[1] that should eventually allow other tools to use gerrit's notedb in the hope that this might eventually lead to the development/adoption of a common format for such tools.

One thing that concerns me about notedb with respect to distributed review is the storage format for comments. Within a distributed review system comments may be made in any order, yet the format is designed around the kind of linearisation that can be assumed by a centralised system.

The problem is that multiple comments in notedb may be stored within the same blob/note, specifically all comments on a particular commit will be stored in the same blob. In a distributed system storing multiple comments in the same blob like this will inevitably lead to merge conflicts.

This problem isn't unsolvable, someone already suggested to me the idea of writing a custom merge driver for merging different notes stored in notedb. It would obviously be preferable to have a format that avoided creating conflicts in the first place, but a custom merge driver doesn't seem like an unreasonable solution.

If anyone has any thoughts on how else this problem might be solved, I'd be very interested to hear them.

Thanks again, Richard Ipsum

[1]: https://bitbucket.org/richardipsum/perl-notedb
Previous: Dave Borowitz
Message 14 of 14 in “git-candidate: git based patch tracking and review”
  1. 0/2 git-candidate: git based patch tracking and reviewRichard Ipsum, Nov 10, 2015
  2. 1/2 contrib: Add git-candidate subcommandRichard Ipsum, Nov 10, 2015
  3. 2/2 contrib/git-candidate: Add READMERichard Ipsum, Nov 10, 2015
  4. David TurnerNov 10, 2015
  5. Richard IpsumNov 11, 2015
  6. David TurnerNov 11, 2015
  7. Sebastian SchuberthJan 6, 2016
  8. Michael HaggertyNov 11, 2015
  9. Richard IpsumNov 11, 2015
  10. Jeff KingNov 14, 2015
  11. Junio C HamanoNov 14, 2015
  12. Jonathan NiederDec 1, 2015
  13. Dave BorowitzDec 1, 2015
  14. Richard IpsumJan 6, 2016

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