title: “Gerrit Project News #9: April-May 2020” tags: news keywords: news permalink: 2020-05-29-gerrit-news-apr-may-2020.html summary: “Gerrit project news from April and May 2020.” hide_sidebar: true hide_navtoggle: true toc: true
Community Management work done
See the dedicated news post.
Cherry-picking topics
By using the same cherry-pick button on a change with a topic, it is now possible to cherry-pick the entire topic. All that's required to cherry-pick an entire topic is to specify the destination branch.
The limitations in this versions are the requirements to pick only one destination branch to all changes in the topic, and that it is not possible to cherry-pick a topic that has multiple changes in the same repository and branch.
Serializing the External Groups Cache
Gerrit can be linked to external user directories like LDAP, providing Gerrit with external users and groups. External groups can be added to Gerrit to restrict access to refs and repos and are mainly used for permissions evaluation.
We implemented a significant performance improvement by serializing the external groups in-memory cache for faster lookups. We used the common serialization infrastructure used by other caches. This has an impact on Gerrit setups that require frequent server restarts, i.e. for warming up caches. For Google hosted Gerrit sites, the cache loading time for all lookup requests was reduced from a few hundreds of minutes to less than 3 minutes per day.
Comments tab moved
We have renamed the “Comment Threads” tab to “Comments” and moved it from next to “Change Log” to next to “Files”.
File status chips
We now have Added(A), Renamed(R), Copied(C), Deleted(D), Unchanged(U), Rewritten(W) chips after the file name on our file list. We do not show “Modified” status anymore.
Mark as active
We have a new Mark as Active button as a one-click action for changing the state from WIP to Active. It is located where the Submit button is.
ESC and CM elections
The Engineering Steering Committee and Community Managers elections have been completed. These were to elect members for the non-Google positions. The Google positions were also confirmed alongside. The resulting elected and Google positions, for both ESC and Community Managers, remain the same as the previous mandates.