Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Question about git style

[Dario Lombardo <dario.lombardo.ml@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jan 2, 2018 at 11:21 AM, Jaap Keuter <jaap.keuter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi,

It seems that you’re no stranger to version control systems (VCS), but new to git. I think it's important in this case to recognise that git is a distributed VCS. That means that you have (a clone of) a repository on your own, and gerrit is an online tool on the origin repository. You can commit to your own repository as much as you want, and decide to push to gerrit when you’re done.
Being done thus means having your changes completed, or wanting to share it with, or reviewed by others. Gerrit provides the infrastructure for that. The first case is assumed when a commit appears in gerrit, if it’s a Work In Progress a marker ‘[WIP]’ is requested to be prefixed on the commit summary line.

If I'm not mistaken, that is not requested. A draft change in gerrit is a change sent to the special branch refs/drafts/master. This is a real draft, that differs from a regular change for the fact that it's not visible to others, until it gets promoted to refs/for/master. A draft change can be reviewed, but this requires the author to manually add reviewers. A [WIP] change it's just a regular change, where the author is informing others that the change is not ready to merge. This is a common practice across projects and VCSes, but it's not enforced by anything on git/gerrit. Nothing prevents a [WIP] change to be merged. From my experience Wireshark developers do that to make the review process easier (for instance because petri dish can't be triggered on a draft change), allowing anyone interested in reviewing it on board.

Dario.