cannot open review, "no new changes"

[James Muir]

Does anyone know why gerrit does not allow a review to be opened when a local branch tracks a remote branch and is up-to-date with it?

For example,

$ git branch -vv
  main             cf3a6643a [origin/main] Fix unit test failure
* jmuir/more-tests 79c278fa8 [origin/jmuir/more-tests] more unit tests
$ git push origin HEAD:refs/for/main
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote: Processing changes: refs: 1, done    
To ssh://gerrit.example.com/foo
 ! [remote rejected]     HEAD -> refs/for/main (no new changes)
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://gerrit.example.com/foo'

I can work around this by updating my local branch using "git commit --amend" so that it is no longer up-to-date with the remote branch.  In that case, gerrit allows the review to be created.

-James M

[James Muir]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2023 at 12:11 AM James Muir <jm...@crypto4a.com> wrote:

Does anyone know why gerrit does not allow a review to be opened when a local branch tracks a remote branch and is up-to-date with it?

this is explained here:  https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/error-no-new-changes.html 

gerrit does not allow the review to be opened because that *commit* already exists upstream.

The fact that the commit is not on the target branch doesn't matter (to gerrit).

[Sven Selberg]

If this is a use-case that you want to support you can set receive.createNewChangeForAllNotInTarget in project.config.

- Sven

 

[James Muir]

Thanks very much for letting me know about that option.

I tried setting it in the gerrit 3.8.1 ui; i.e. I set "Create a new change for every commit not in the target branch" to true in the relevant project.

Initially, I thought the option was not working, but it appears I was hitting a defect in git-review:

$ git branch -vv

* jmuir/foo    b570abc [origin/jmuir/foo] even more foo

  master       72bef46 [origin/master] more foo, more testing

$ git review -r origin master

No changes between HEAD and origin/master. Submitting for review would

be pointless.

$ git review -r origin --no-track master
No changes between HEAD and origin/master. Submitting for review would
be pointless.

$ git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master

Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0

remote: Processing changes: refs: 1, new: 1, done    

remote:

remote: SUCCESS

remote:

remote:   https://gerrit.example.com/c/jm-test/+/184 even more foo [NEW]

remote:

To ssh://gerrit.example.com/jm-test

 * [new reference]   HEAD -> refs/for/master

git-review must be doing its own check somehow.

-James M