Posting a review against multiple repositories.

[Joseph Henry]

Hello,

Me and my team have been successfully using ReviewBoard for about half a year now, and I am looking at rolling it out to the whole of R&D.

The only problem that we have so far, is that many times, our code changes are across multiple repos. I have been able to work around this with CVS by creating a dummy CVS directory in the root, and adding all the repos to the ENTRIES, but now we are migrating to GIT and this will no longer work.

Basically my question is: Is there any way to post a review that uses More than 1 repository?  Example would be 1 GIT repo and 1 CVS repo, or 2 GIT repos, ...

If this is not currently possible, how difficult do you think it would be to make a custom RBT command to be able to do this?

Thanks,

Joseph.

[David Trowbridge]

Joseph,

There's no way for a single review request to span repositories. What you can do (and what we recommend) is to use the "depends on" field to indicate the interdependencies between the changes in each repository.

Making custom rbt commands is pretty easy. You can either do it in Python, or you could write a script named "rbt-X" that invokes "rbt post" in each repository, which can then be accessed through the top-level as "rbt X" (replace X with your own name).

-David

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[David Carson]

Has the concept of adding support for a single review across multiple repositories had any new traction?  We are very interested in this support.  My perusal of this group tells me that this is not an uncommon question--more so for ClearCase than for our use case (git), but nonetheless something that would be valuable to many development teams.

We currently use the 'depends on' fields, as suggested by David below.  However, our developers find this to be cumbersome, especially since it is not uncommon for a single review to span 5 or 6 repositories.  The reviewers are constantly having to jump around between reviews, often having to guess which one might contain the change they are interested in.

We are looking at hacking RB to get something working for our team.  But I'd much rather work with the RB team on contributing to a well-architected solution.

Thanks,
David

[Eric Chamberland]

Hi,

I just jump into this conversation to say that we have the same problem here: we have to manage a "review" as a set of changes across multiple repositories.

So +1 for this feature to be implemented.

Thanks,

Eric

[rchmielarz]

Hi all,

I'm also interested in this feature since the group I'm working with uses git submodules and we are interested in a coherent review. But since there was no interest from review board developers so far I wanted to ask: where should I start to implement a proof of concept for git? I'm interested only to extend it for patches.

A single review can have only one associated repository in the sql schema it seems, this can probably be easily changed. But then I would have to create a special format of patches so that each file is attributed to a repository so that the review board could show the differences. Is such a patch format already available by some tools? And let's say I manage all that: review has multiple repositories and I have a patch which has them associacted with each of those repositories. Is there anything else that should be taken care of?

Cheers,

Radek

[Christian Hammond]

Hi Radek,

This is really a lot more work than it seems like it'll be.

Diff files themselves have no concept of a repository they're associated with. We do have a repository reference for DiffSet model entries, but you're not going to squeeze multiple concurrent DiffSets onto a review request. We'd need a lot of work on the schema, the UI, and the API to make all this work, and it's a huge project that will leave you unable to cleanly upgrade in the future.

There may be another approach, which is to create a sort of "proxy" hosting service that wraps your other repositories. So basically, one repository pretending to be multiple ones. The problem then has to do with file lookups. You'd need a custom diffs generated by custom tools that, for instance, prefixes file paths with a repository identifier, so the hosting service can know where to look up the files. For instance, a diff containing /repo123/absolute/path/to/file could be handled by the hosting service by stripping off that first bit, looking up the correct backing repository, and then passing the rest of the path to it.

That's probably the least-invasive way of handling this. The client-side tooling might be the biggest part of this.

Christian

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Christian Hammond

President/CEO of Beanbag

Makers of Review Board

[Andras Soltesz]

+1 for this feature because we would also need this.

My organization is planning to transition from a huge SVN instance to ~100 small Git repo-s.

The biggest hurdle we see is that many of our developments will affect multiple repositories so we need a code-review tool that can work on multiple repos as well. Otherwise we will often need to manage 6-10 pull request for one logical change.

2019. január 29., kedd 1:58:01 UTC+1 időpontban Christian Hammond a következőt írta:

Hi Radek,

This is really a lot more work than it seems like it'll be.

Diff files themselves have no concept of a repository they're associated with. We do have a repository reference for DiffSet model entries, but you're not going to squeeze multiple concurrent DiffSets onto a review request. We'd need a lot of work on the schema, the UI, and the API to make all this work, and it's a huge project that will leave you unable to cleanly upgrade in the future.

There may be another approach, which is to create a sort of "proxy" hosting service that wraps your other repositories. So basically, one repository pretending to be multiple ones. The problem then has to do with file lookups. You'd need a custom diffs generated by custom tools that, for instance, prefixes file paths with a repository identifier, so the hosting service can know where to look up the files. For instance, a diff containing /repo123/absolute/path/to/file could be handled by the hosting service by stripping off that first bit, looking up the correct backing repository, and then passing the rest of the path to it.

That's probably the least-invasive way of handling this. The client-side tooling might be the biggest part of this.

Christian

On Fri, Jan 18, 2019 at 8:04 AM rchmielarz <radoslaw...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

I'm also interested in this feature since the group I'm working with uses git submodules and we are interested in a coherent review. But since there was no interest from review board developers so far I wanted to ask: where should I start to implement a proof of concept for git? I'm interested only to extend it for patches.

A single review can have only one associated repository in the sql schema it seems, this can probably be easily changed. But then I would have to create a special format of patches so that each file is attributed to a repository so that the review board could show the differences. Is such a patch format already available by some tools? And let's say I manage all that: review has multiple repositories and I have a patch which has them associacted with each of those repositories. Is there anything else that should be taken care of?

Cheers,

Radek

On Thursday, 23 November 2017 20:15:14 UTC+1, Eric Chamberland wrote:

Hi,

I just jump into this conversation to say that we have the same problem here: we have to manage a "review" as a set of changes across multiple repositories.

So +1 for this feature to be implemented.

Thanks,

Eric

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[Paul Mansfield]

how about having reviews follow the epic/story model... a parent review with child reviews. Each child review would be associated with individual repositories, and you then set it so that nothing can be landed until all related reviews are marked as ship-its?

this might be much easier to achieve in the reviewboard code than reviews which span repositories?

[Christian Hammond]

We have a plan and partial implementation for repository-spanned changes. We’re considering it for Review Board 5.

Christian 

On Thu, Aug 6, 2020 at 04:21 Paul Mansfield <paul.ma...@agileanalog.com> wrote:

how about having reviews follow the epic/story model... a parent review with child reviews. Each child review would be associated with individual repositories, and you then set it so that nothing can be landed until all related reviews are marked as ship-its?

this might be much easier to achieve in the reviewboard code than reviews which span repositories?

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