Gerrit Project News #1: June-August 2018

Hello, Gerrit users! This is the first in a series of newsletters that we’ll send out each quarter to update you on the UX related stuff that we have been working on in Gerrit. We’ll also discuss features and changes that you can expect to see in the near future.

Things we worked on this quarter

Updated labels interface

The presentation of labels was updated to make better use of space, and address issues such as this bug. All labels now appear in two sections, Required labels and Other labels. This design solves two UX issues:

• Merging the submit requirements and votes sections has helped us avoid repeating all the labels under both sections, reducing the vertical real estate required to display a large number of labels.
• The Other labels section can now be collapsed so in case of a large number of labels, users can collapse the list to get to the file list quickly.

Image diff

You now have more tools to compare images. The new image diffing plugin adds new modes that make it easier to quickly locate small differences between similar images.

Gerrit dark theme

This was actually added in April during the Lund Hackathon. It can be enabled via the Settings menu.

What we’re working on

New metadata layout

The new metadata design horizontally arranges some of the metadata information about a change just below the change title. This frees up vertical space from the left section on the UI, which reduces the scrolling needed to get to the file list. The left section of the change is now dedicated to data about people and votes.

Draft comments

Have you ever drafted comments in Gerrit, but lost track of them before publishing? This design makes unpublished drafts more discoverable, more convenient to publish, and easier to navigate.

We’re taking them out of the Reply dialog and placing them at a more prominent location on the UI. This decouples the Start review action for WIP changes with the Publish drafts. The design also enables users to easily jump from one draft comment to another from the file view using the Draft comments panel.

Patchset navigation

Informed by bug reports like this one, the redesign adds:

• A single drop-down to select patchsets that reduces visual focus shifts and clicks to compare two patchsets.
• Showing a better representation of patchset history that shows when the rebases happened and more prominent indication for unresolved comments.
• An expandable Patchset info panel that shows a lot of other relevant information about the patchsets such as commenters, number of total and unresolved comments and votes for each patchset.
• A quick way to view all the unresolved comments for a selected patchset by clicking the number link under the unresolved comments column inside the Patchset Info panel.

Authors: arnabb@google.com, kaspern@google.com, wyatta@google.com

Bugs? Feedback? File it here!