Participants: Edwin Kempin [EK], Luca Milanesio [LM], Saša Živkov [SZ]
Next meeting: September 24, 2025
A critical Gerrit migration to Bazel 8 is needed to fix compatibility issues with JGit. Gerritforge offered to lead the effort with Google providing reviews. The immediate next step is to add more details to the associated issue 303819949.
Two key community events were announced: a Git Mini Summit in Amsterdam on August 28th and a GerritMeet at Google's Munich HQ on November 19th. The Munich event is notable as Google will unveil a new open-source MCP server, which generated significant interest.
The future of AI-powered code review was discussed, centered on the experimental “help me review” feature. Google confirmed ongoing internal development and welcomed collaboration to prevent duplicated work. A native chat functionality was also proposed to streamline AI integration in the future.
[LM] raised the issue of migrating Gerrit to Bazel mode, noting that JGit had already migrated to Bazel 8 and bzlmod, causing compatibility issues with Gerrit, which is still on Bazel 7.6.6 and relies on WORKSPACE support. [EK] confirmed that the migration effort is not yet on Google’s Gerrit Team backlog, as they rely on Blaze, which still supports WORKSPACE for the foreseeable future. [LM] suggested that Gerritforge Inc. could allocate the task for the effort through the compatibility approach (see https://bazel.build/external/migration), assuming that Google is available for reviews, because any modification to the dependencies requires an LC+1 from a Google maintainer. [SZ] suggested that Matthias Sohn would be a suitable person to help with this, and [EK] agreed that a summary should be added to the issue 303819949 detailing the work, pluses, minuses, and required involvement from Gerrit maintainers would be helpful to start the discussion and planning of the activity.
[LM] announced that Gerritforge, GitLab, GitButler and Google are sponsoring a new Git event in Europe, scheduled for August 28th in Amsterdam. [LM] explained that this “Git mini summit” was organized as a community-driven complement of Git Merge in the US for all of those who have travel restrictions or concerns to the USA. Their team plans to present their work on JGit optimization and performance improvement with Gerrit, GitLab, and GitHub Enterprise, thanks to the R&D work done by Gerritforge in 2024 and 2025 as part of the GHS product. [EK] mentioned that the Gerrit team is unlikely to participate in this community event; however, other Google members working on the Git Team will join.
[LM] announced that Florian from Google Cloud and Daniele from Gerritforge had agreed to organize a GerritMeet event at the Google EU HQ in Munich, with the date already set to November 19th, 2025. [LM] also mentioned that Google would be presenting a brand-new MCP server for Gerrit Code Review as a new Open-Source project on the Gerrit ecosystem. [EK] and [SZ] expressed interest in attending, especially since it is in Germany and relevant to their activities.
[SZ] inquired about the future of Gerrit‘s experimental “help me review” AI button, which their users have been exposing internally. [EK] confirmed that there are many internal discussions about this feature and suggested reaching out to Milutin, who is driving Google’s AI efforts around Gerrit, who has started implementing the frontend UI based on a fake backend. [EK] welcomed help from [SZ] with this effort, which would prevent duplicated work. [LM] noted that while the current AI suggestions are about 20-30% useful, integrating a native chat functionality within Gerrit could make existing AI code review plugins (chatgpt-code-review and ai-code-review) less relevant in the future, and they are happy to support Google‘s AI endeavor once it’s fully open-sourced.