spr VS git-bug

Graphite is neat. If you want something lighter-weight, spr[1] is also worth taking a look at as an entirely client-side "solution" to PR stacking.

Unfortunately, it is very hard to build good code review tooling on top of GitHub due to the severe impedance mismatch between the two models as well as GitHub API limitations and rate limits. That mismatch cannot be fully resolved (branches vs. patches) and results in constant friction, and you end up trusting a third party with full control over your repositories and approval workflows.

Graphite is the best attempt I've seen so far, but it still doesn't come anywhere close to Gerrit[2], which simply uses plain Git commits. Every commit becomes a review, and stacking is accomplished by simply pushing multiple commits. No custom tooling required - just `git push`.

It has very, very good code review UX and allows meaningful and in-depth back-and-forth during a code review, without losing context or having to re-review the entire diff. Once you're past the initial learning curve, it is blissful.

Gerrit is open source and it's what Google uses for many of their public projects such as Chromium and Android, and it is quite easy to self-host. It is entirely built on JGit and even stores code reviews as Git commits alongside the repositories.

If you want to give it a try - there's a well-maintained public instance, Gerrithub[3], operated by Gerritforge. Many open source projects use it.

[1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

[2]: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/

[3]: https://gerrithub.io

The CLI doesn't help with stacked commits, though. There's tools like spr[1] but none of them are anywhere as pleasant to use as Gerrit (or Phabricator, I guess).

[1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

Haven't tried this one but Reviewable and Graphite. They're all very nice and yours looks nice also. The problem with all these third party SaaS-es on top of GitHub:

- You have to trust a random (no offense meant!) SaaS company with wide-ranging access to your repository.

- GitHub API rate limits end up causing issues sooner or later. For instance, Reviewable would randomly break and ask you to add more admin users so it could load balance API requests across multiple accounts!

- Likewise, you are still forced into the PR model and things that are trivial in Gerrit, like stacked diffs, are still hard. spr helps[1], but at that point you are piling workarounds on top of workarounds, might as well use a tool that supports the workflow natively...

[1]: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

But, probably better to use https://github.com/ejoffe/spr (which I found many months after writing the create-stack script). Though, in this particular PR's case, it would have been a lot of work to preserve the commit IDs in the commit messages thanks to its generated nature; if you have a stack produced by hand, it'd work a lot better because a human is editing the PR and its description.

Another tool to look out for: https://github.com/ejoffe/spr

I've heard good things from our customers about spr for GitHub (https://github.com/ejoffe/spr). It extends git with useful commands and hooks directly into GitHub PRs. We'll be adding some direct support for the tool in Reviewable shortly.

Unfortunately github appears to be actively breaking the ability to use git-bug on large repositories (like nixpkgs):

https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/issues/749#issuecomme...

True but getting less true by the day:

https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

https://www.fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki

Only not having access to https://todo.sr.ht made me to recognize fully, that I don’t have any access to it. https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug suddenly looks much more interesting.

Neither do the issues support. But there is git-bug [0].

[0]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

As a sort of spiritual successor to git-appraise, I've been working on git-bug[1] which support issues and will at some point support kanban and code review. There is a few notables improvements:

- CRDT-like reusable data structure [2][3] for true p2p workflow and easily create new entities (code review ...)

- bidirectional bridges to github, gitlab ... to ease the transition or just use git-bug as a complement of those platform

- CLI, terminal UI and web UI, for different taste and integrate into your tooling/workflow

[1]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

[2]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/blob/master/doc/model...

[3]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/blob/master/entity/da...

> but that is for the development of the platform and network of Gitopia. For the end user the workflows remain almost the same for collaboration.

I have to disagree here. Accidental complexity in a system can have severe downstream impacts on end users, whether that be in the form of poor performance, unreliability, or just slow update cycles. It's not something you can paper over and completely hide from the user.

> Along with this the blockchain layer layer offers immutable, transparent and tamper proof versioning of code

Tamper-proof can be accomplished natively by signing [0]. receive.denyNonFastForwards and receive.denyDeletes[1] can be used to make a git repository immutable. Git commits are also already content-addressable. And transparency is achieved by just having the repo available for people to clone.

> along with the collaboration meta and augments the current collaboration flow

Could this augmentation not be accomplished by storing the collaboration information in the repo under a set of special-purpose branches? Like git-bug[2] or git-issue[3]? Coupled with GPG signatures and you've got your immutability, too!

> Along with this it enables us to provide a novel means to incentivize open-source contributions along with fostering a more decentralized approach for governance (even for projects), every token holder could have a say in the decision making, reducing the risk of undue influence by a single party, hence eliminating centralized control.

This one I'll grant you, but it's by far the least compelling aspect of the project to me. I don't think we're going to solve the centralization of GitHub by centralizing on a new plutocracy, I'd much rather see efforts towards full decentralization. There's nothing inherent to Git that requires that we all use the same set of servers.

[0] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configura...

[2] https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

[3] https://github.com/dspinellis/git-issue

Regarding the issues, there are some projects like git-bug https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug trying to embed these sorts of meta-work into git.

Probably git-bug is closer to what Fossil does: It uses Git as a storage engine, and can coexist with your code in the same physical repository, but the issues don't actually show up as source files. Instead, each issue is a special branch (buried in refs so it won't clutter up git branch) that has zero common ancestry with anything else. So in theory you can poke at it with Git, but really, the Git under the hood is mostly an implementation detail, and as long as you interact with those files through the tool, it guarantees you won't have merge conflicts.

You might be interested by git-bug and https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/blob/master/doc/model..., which seems to be exactly what you describe. (Disclaimer: author).