[coreboot] [RFC]Using gerrit for patch management (and jenkins for QA)

[Patrick Georgi]

Hi,

I'm officially sick and tired of patchwork. Or from losing patches to
the mailing list.

Given how the git read-only mirror gains popularity, maybe we should use
that to our advantage and upgrade other parts of our tool set, too.

Enter gerrit: A web tool to push git commits to, have them reviewed,
with proper handling of updated patches. Automatic support for
dependencies between commits (by default it assumes that ancestry means
dependency). An automated gatekeeper to the repository.

It's built by Google and they use it for Android
(https://review.source.android.com/) and Chromium
(http://gerrit.chromium.org/). Thankfully, it's open source.

Should we use it, I'd also add Jenkins (http://www.jenkins-ci.org) to
the mix. Jenkins is a fork of Hudson, both are Continuous Integration tools.
Kinda like our current build bot at qa.coreboot.org, just with some more
maintenance behind it, and a couple of neat features:

"The mix" would be inclue jenkins test-building all proposed patches on
gerrit, vetoing those that fail in gerrit. Nice for commits where the
dev forgot to add a file to the repo, or which were only partially tested.

Anyway, this would be a rather large change in the development workflow,
so unlike other changes to our infrastructure this is nothing I can
"just do".

Opinions?


Patrick