ITK/Gerrit/Primer

This primer is to aid the ITK developer community in using Gerrit. Some of the idiosyncrasies of Gerrit take a little work to understand and appreciate, especially if one is new to using the git distributed revision control system.

Gerrit basics

Gerrit is designed to take a single change with a change log and make it publicly available for comments and revisions. Once the change has been sufficiently reviewed and approved, it will be pushed into the official ITK repository. Gerrit addresses the problem of many changes scattered about many git repositories by bringing them into a central place and allowing commenting and changes to become transparent to the rest of the community.

Creating a Gerrit account

In order to register you need to get an OpenID. Be aware that a GMail account automatically gives you an OpenID.

To register with Gerrit, first have your OpenID ready. Then visit http://review.source.kitware.com/. Click the "Register" link in the upper left. If you have a Google or Yahoo account, click on the "Register with a Google account". This will create your account. Otherwise, enter the URL of an OpenID provider.

git / Gerrit workflow

For the sake of this primer, we'll be making a series of small documentation changes to ITK code. The basic workflow from the developer's standpoint is:

• Clone the ITK official repository
• Create a topic branch
• Edit, commit, edit, commit, ad infinitum
• Compress your branch into a single commit
• Push your changes into Gerrit
• Review
• Stage changes into the ITK official repository

These steps will be detailed in the next sections.