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Comment by yx827ha | Hacker News Reader

If you want something similar, check out Gerrit: https://www.gerritcodereview.com/ It's open source and used by Android and Chrome.

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It looks like Critque is a branch of Gerrit. The user interface is similar. I assume that Critque is Grerrit with a bunch of Google-specific changes.

Gerrit itself is an interesting review tool. It uses Git references to manage the review changeset before it is merged into the parent branch.

I used it on a project that used Redmine for issue tracking and Gerrit for the git repo and review tool. It took a bit to get used to how to git to push changes to a Gerrit review so we ended up using Git extensions to manage that.

I assume that Critque is Grerrit with a bunch of Google-specific changes.

Not even close. I have another comment where I get into some details, but, no, three's no overlap beyond the fact that Gerrit pulled some UI and workflow things from Critique (and Mondrian before that, the tool that predated Critique)

I dunno. I use gerrit frequently and nothing in this article surprised me. Aside from "ML-powered woo woo" I've seen and used everything bragged about in this article.

Gerrit is awesome. I will never, ever go back to github.

Whether you're surprised or not or like Gerrit is beside the point. I like it too. I was simply responding to your assertion that Critique is a fork or derived from Gerrit, which is not correct.

They are two entirely separate codebases, built on two entirely different revision controls systems -- one open source, the other not -- with Gerrit inspired by Critique, not the other way around. Yes there are similarities be tween it and Critique. Because Googlers worked on both.

I miss Gerrit from my last job. Stacked PRs on Github are horrible. Lots of problems stem from that: because stacked PRs are painful, people make large PRs, because the PRs are large, they take a long time to merge, because they take a long time to merge you need more rebases, needing more re-reviews etc.

> It looks like Critque is a branch of Gerrit

IIRC Gerrit is an open source re-implementation from scratch of Critique.

Yeah, it seems like Gerrit with lots of Google-specific stuff. Not surprised. Used Gerrit for 12 years, and loved it.

Gerrit is pretty crap compared to critique. It has a workflow that works for Android, but critique is really much better.

The essential thing is that Gerrit is a swiss army knife review tool for git, whereas Critique is able to be consistent and fluid because it only has to worry about working with the standard workflow in Piper/CitC (and now fig I guess)

I agree Critique is much nicer, but mostly because it's more consistent and doesn't have to deal with all the oddities of git.

Can you be more specific?

Gerrit does in fact impose a particular workflow: each commit is the atomic unit of review.

This, BTW, is a beautiful thing. Most of the idiocy of github is trying to have multi-commit pull requests. Then they had to bodge on that "suggested changes" nonsense instead of having proper dependency tracking between pull requests.

When each commit is the unit of review, you get pull request dependencies and recursive pull requests automatically. Instead of suggesting changes you can simply create a commit with your suggestion which has the reviewed commit as its parent. It's so simple yet so much more powerful.

What do you think Gerrit is missing compared to Critique?

Graphite[0] is also similar in that space(code review platform built on GitHub), the CLI could use some work but combined with the web UI it scratches that same itch that Critique did for me

[0] https://graphite.dev/

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