From what I can tell, we have essentially three choices:
* Continue to work with the heavily centralized and clunky Gerrit
workflow, and try to beat it into shape to not cause us too much pain,
while seeing people increasingly move into GitHub for doing
experimental projects. Hope for Gerrit's large developer base to
ultimately join a rewrite effort, or to incrementally make it better.
Build Gerrit/GitHub bridges if possible.
* Drink the kool-aid and join the wonderful semi-open world of GitHub,
with all the risks and benefits it entails.
* Help build a realistic alternative to GitHub, probably by building
on the open source toolset that's the closest right now in terms of
its overall architectural approach and existing functionality. (My
impression: Gitorious is closer in functionality but at a lower
overall quality, Phabricator/Barkeep are much more limited in
functionality right now and therefore would take a long time to be
usable with our current workflow assumptions.)
I agree with Rob that changing Gerrit or Gitorious or Gitlab is not
something that we should get undertake lightly. In my opinion, it is
more realistic to evaluate the tools as they exist today, with maybe
mostly minor changes and small features that MW developers could
contribute towards. Larger changes might require more dedicated
developer resources and would also take time.
Subbu.
OT: I also noticed some Ruby concerns on this thread. Except Gerrit, 4
of the other 5 candidates (Github, Gitorious, Gitlab, and Barkeep) are
all written in Ruby (on Rails possibly). Ruby performance has improved
over the years for all 3 implementations (MRI, Rubinius, and JRuby).
JRuby (Ruby implementation on the JVM) performance especially has
improved quite a lot over the last couple years. Over the last 3
years, I have been an active developer on JRuby and I have also written
and maintained Rails apps. So, I am familiar with Ruby and am happy to
help with Ruby related issues.
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