OpenStack Nova switched from bzr and launchpad to github and gerrit on Friday. While I'm delighted the project is using git now, I've always found the gerrit UI to be a bit of a pain.
On IRC, Monty Taylor mentioned the gerrit command line interface which looked fairly interesting. Sure enough, you can actually review and approve a patch using this without ever touching the web UI. Below is an example of reviewing a Glance patch, but the same thing would work for Nova.
First, you obviously need to clone the repo:
$> git clone git://github.com/openstack/glance.git
$> cd glance
To make life a little easier, you can add a host alias to your SSH config:
$> cat >> ~/.ssh/config <<EOF
Host review
Hostname review.openstack.org
Port 29418
User markmc
EOF
Then add the gerrit server as a git remote:
$> git remote add -f gerrit ssh://markmc@review/openstack/glance.git
Okay, now browse the patches needing review:
$> ssh review gerrit query status:open project:openstack/glance | less
Once you've picked a patch, take it's Change-Id: and look at its patch sets and reviews:
$> ssh review gerrit query status:open project:openstack/glance
change:I27bb6b3951422ad32e5e0225765b1056c5b3ffc5
--current-patch-set --all-approvals | less
Then, using the 'ref' in the output, you can fetch the patches into your repo and review them:
$> git fetch gerrit refs/changes/36/636/2
$> git checkout -b git-authors FETCH_HEAD
Once you're ready to submit your review, you can do:
$> git checkout master
$> git branch -D git-authors
$> ssh review gerrit review --code-review +1 -m "'Looks good to me.'" cd9b3a0f2fb91d0d01606ef4bbd90cf8f29267da
That's all pretty neat, but I'm missing how to go about doing a detailed review with comments inline with quoted sections of code. Perhaps if 'gerrit review' could take the review comments over stdin?