RFE: Preference to enable include of full commit diff in gerrit email notifications

[Daniel Berrange]

When someone submits a patch for review, gerrit is nice enough to email people, but the email only contains misc metadata about the patch. Often it is not clear from the commit message whether the patch is something I should take a closer look at. Switching from email over to the web UI to skim the patch is not a very efficient workflow. I would prefer to be able to see the full commit diff in the initial email alert, so I can very quickly see if the code is worth taking a closer look at. Only then would I go to gerrit for a detailed review.

I can understand some people would not want have their email "bloated" with patches, so I imagine some email notification preference in gerrit would be required to turn patch diff inclusion on/off. Oh, and the diff should be inline to the mail email body, not an attachment.

[Chris Wright (chrisw-x)]

This appears to be implemented in upstream gerrit:

4a80e99 Add unified diff to newchange mail template.
02aacbc sendemail.includeDiff: Enable $email.UnifiedDiff in NewChange.vm

I second the notion that this would be useful (and more useful if the email could then be replied to as mentioned in https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-ci/+bug/861722).

[James E. Blair (corvus)]

Then we should get this when we upgrade to 2.6

[Khai Do (zaro0508)]

We have upgraded to gerrit 2.8 so now diffs are in the email. The amount of the diff that gets sent in email is configurable with "sendemail.includeDiff" gerrit setting, https://review.openstack.org/Documentation/config-gerrit.html

I'm not sure if we've gotten consensus on what to set it to though.

[Khai Do (zaro0508)]

This is fixed. The default setting in gerrit 2.8 is to email inline comments. We can set to full diffs if there's consensus. I will close out this issue. Please come to the openstack-infra meeting to discuss possible changes to this setting.