We‘re aware that it’s currently difficult to follow discussions on change level as the change messages shown in the Change Log don't have any explicit relation to each other beyond the included quotes. In addition, such messages can contain action items which can easily be missed. Hence, we welcome improvements to this.
By suggesting to use comments for the human-written part of a change message, the proposed solution nicely makes use of existing Gerrit concepts. Thus, it can directly benefit from existing features such as threading for comments and their unresolved state as well as an appropriate visualization in the Comment Threads view. The future maintenance effort should also be lower due to the reuse of existing code. Of course, some adjustments will be necessary to allow to post comments without attaching them to a file but we don't expect any major rework for this.
We haven‘t agreed on the exact backend implementation or UI/UX for this effort yet. We’ll do so while iterating on the implementation of the solution. This effort will only be considered done if the new kind of comments are properly integrated in the UI of Gerrit, meaning that users can see and interact with them on all relevant views.
Jacek Centkowski will drive the backend implementation and Dhruv Srivastava will do the same for the frontend implementation. The whole effort will be mentored by Alice Kober-Sotzek.
The implementation is scheduled to start in the 13th week of 2020.