TVL Code Reviews

Table of Contents

TVL Code Reviews

This document describes the TVL code review process & tooling. If you are looking for general contribution guidelines, please look at the general contribution guidelines.

All changes are tracked at cl.tvl.fyi using Gerrit. See Registration for information on how to register an account.

Gerrit setup

Gerrit uses the concept of change IDs to track commits across rebases and other operations that might change their hashes, and link them to unique changes in Gerrit.

First, tell Gerrit about your SSH keys.

Then, to make using Gerrit smooth for users, the repository should be cloned and a commit hook should be installed as follows:

git clone "ssh://$USER@code.tvl.fyi:29418/depot"
scp -p -P 29418 $USER@code.tvl.fyi:hooks/commit-msg "depot/.git/hooks/"

If you have a previous clone of the depot via HTTP you can use git remote set-url to update the origin URL and install the hook in the same way as above.

Gerrit workflows

The developer workflow on Gerrit is quite different from what GitHub-users are used to.

The depot does not have branches (other than Gerrit's internal metadata refs) and all development happens at HEAD.

Every time you create a new commit the change hook will insert a unique Change-Id tag into the commit message. Once you are satisfied with the state of your commit and want to submit it for review, you push it to a git ref called refs/for/canon. This designates the commits as changelists (CLs) targeted for the canon branch.

Sending a change for review is done by pushing to a special target. You can set this to be the default push target through your git configuration:

git config remote.origin.url "ssh://$USER@code.tvl.fyi:29418/depot"
git config remote.origin.push HEAD:refs/for/canon

Then, after making your change, push to the default, or to a special target:

Example:
git commit -m 'docs(REVIEWS): Fixed all the errors in the reviews docs'
git push origin

# Uploading a work-in-progress CL:
git push origin HEAD:refs/for/canon%wip

TIP: Every individual commit will become a separate change. We do not merge related commits, but instead submit them one by one. Be aware that if you are expecting a different behaviour and attempt something like an unsquashed subtree merge, you will produce a lot of CLs. This is strongly discouraged.

During your review, the reviewer(s) might ask you to make changes. You can simply amend your commit(s) and push to the same ref. Gerrit will automatically update your changes.

Read more about the Gerrit workflow in the Gerrit walkthrough.

Review process & approvals

Each user has the ability to create their own users directory in //users/<username> in which they can submit code without review from other contributors (they will still need to +2 their own changes, and the initial check-in of the OWNERS file needs to be reviewed).

You can set a directory like this up for yourself by proposing a change similar to CL/246.

For all paths outside of //users, code review is required. We have no strict guidelines about the review process itself, as we're not a megacorp, but we have formalised checks before submitting:

At least one person who is an owner of the codepath must have given a +2 review
The commit message must conform to our guidelines
No code review comments must be left unresolved

If all these conditions are fulfilled, the change author submits their change themselves.

Registration

If you would like to have an account on the Gerrit instance, follow these instructions:

Be a member of ##tvl-dev or ##tvl.
Clone the depot locally (via git clone "https://cl.tvl.fyi/depot").
Create a user entry in our LDAP server in tvl-slapd/default.nix.

We recommend using ARGON2 password hashes, which can be created with the slappasswd tool if OpenLDAP was compiled with ARGON2 support.

For convenience, we provide a wrapper script for this that you can build with nix-build -A tools.hash-password in a depot checkout. Alternatively, if you have direnv installed, you can add the depot to your allowlist and just run hash-password which should be added to your $PATH by direnv.

You can probably create ARGON2 hashes with other tools, but that is your job to figure out.
Create a commit adding yourself (see e.g. CL/2348)
Submit the commit via email (see below).

Submitting changes via email

You can submit a patch via email to depot@tazj.in and it will be added to Gerrit by a contributor.

Create an appropriate commit locally and send it us using either of these options:

git format-patch: This will create a .patch file which you should email to us.
git send-email: If configured on your system, this will take care of the whole emailing process for you.

The email address is a public group.