[ANNOUNCEMENT] Our Gerrit instance is online!

[Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj at redhat dot com>]

Hi there,

After almost 1 month from our BoF, I am pleased to announce that our
brand new Gerrit instance is up and running, ready to be used for patch
submissions and reviews.  The URL is:

  https://gnutoolchain-gerrit.osci.io/

Yeah, it's not a very catchy name, but the reason I decided to go with
"gnutoolchain-gerrit" is because there is interest from Carlos to use
our instance for glibc as well.

Simon has started writing a nice wiki page containing a "quick-start"
guide plus some advices on how to use Gerrit; please take a look (and
feel free to expand it, of course!):

  https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/Gerrit

But in a nutshell: after you go to the main page of our instance, you
can click on the "Sign in" link (top-right corner).  It will take you to
this fancy page where you can click on "Register", fill the form,
validate your email, and voilà: you will be registered to start using
the service.  From this point on, you should really read the wiki page
as it explains the next steps to set up everything (especially the
commit hook needed in order to include the Change-Id information on new
commits).

You should be able to push a new change to be reviewed, and to
review/comment on existing changes.

FAQ
---

Q0: Wait, Gerrit?  Why?  How?
A0: We had a GDB BoF during the last GNU Cauldron, and most people
agreed that our current patch review system is not working really well.
Some people, including at least 3 global maintainers, already use Gerrit
for other projects, and that's the tool the majority decided to try:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdzpbnGDvZM

(Sorry about the YouTube link; I suggest using youtube-dl for watching
it.)

Q1: I don't like it!  Can I still send my patches to gdb-patches?
A1: Yes.  For now, Gerrit usage will be optional for patch submitters,
since we are still deciding whether we (as a community) will want to use
it officially or not.

Q2: Can I use the "Submit" feature to make Gerrit push the commit
automatically to the repository once it's been approved?
A2: Not yet.  Our official repository is still the one hosted on
sourceware.org.  Gerrit's master branch is "read-only" for now; it is
only updated by a script that runs every 5 minutes or so.  When your
change is accepted, you will still need to manually push it to
sourceware's binutils-gdb.git.  The good thing is that Gerrit is able to
notice that the change has been pushed (as long as you keep the
Change-Id intact), and it will mark your change as "Merged"
automatically.

Q3: Are there any plans to migrate our Gerrit instance to sourceware.org?
A3: Yes.  If we decide that we want to use Gerrit as our official patch
submission system, the long term plan is to migrate it to sourceware.org
and set it up in a way that we can use the "Submit" feature.  We will
have to discuss this with the binutils folks, but let's worry about this
when/if we get there.

Kudos
-----

I would like to thank Simon and Joel for their invaluable help.  Simon
has been helping a lot by setting up our repository on Gerrit and
tweaking its permissions, and Joel offered some really nice insights
during the initial configuration phase.  Thanks to Christian Biesinger
for being the official alpha tester, too.

I would also like to thank the OSCI project, especially Marc Dequènes
(Duck), for providing us with the necessary infrastructure to run yet
another service (yes, they also host our Buildbot master!).

I hope this can be helpful to our community.

Thanks,

-- 
Sergio
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