Gerrit should support reviewing related patchsets (aka "topic reviews")

[Monty Taylor]

A common practice is to want to submit work as a series of related patches, each of which is a working atomic change, but which don't make sense overall without each other. Because of the single-change orientation of gerrit, this is currently a bit difficult to deal with.

There has been work to add support for topic branches and patchsets:

https://github.com/dcelix/tools_gerrit/commits/topic_reviews

http://groups.google.com/group/repo-discuss/browse_thread/thread/e6846b6bfb4b28c0

We should look at this work and see if it would be useful to us.

Additionally, we should determine if the atomicity of this work would help with submitting related changes to multiple projects.

[Mark McLoughlin (markmc)]

Looks like this is the most recent thread: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/repo-discuss/gXjbuhfW0tg

"We agree that this is an important feature to get into Gerrit, although it looks like we still have many to convince ;-) "

[Dan Kegel (dank)]

I think this is
http://code.google.com/p/gerrit/issues/detail?id=51
I hear Kitware's been using a topic review patch for some time, haven't tried it myself yet.

[Khai Do (zaro0508)]

This issue seems to be asking for 2 features, topic reviews and cross project dependencies. Gerrit already supports dependent changes. Gerrit also allows you to apply topics to changes thereby allowing you to group/classify a set of changes. I believe this satisfies the topic review feature. Gerrit does not support cross project dependencies though. Maybe we should close this issue?

[Mark McLoughlin (markmc)]

I didn't mention anything about cross-project dependencies (perhaps it's a feature of Kitware's stuff and that's what made you mention it?)

For me, this is about having much improved support for series of patches . For example, gerrit currently has no view of the entire set of patches that shows you the ordering - to understand the ordering, you'd have to pick one and navigate through the "needed by" and "depends on" links. There's also no ability to add a "cover letter" in the same way a [PATCH 0/12] email allows.

(There's also notion of merging an entire series together, although how we *want* such a feature to work is probably debatable)