gerrit-grr 5.0

I recently released 5.0.0 of my grr tool that makes working with Gerrit easier. It is an alternative to git-review; I personally think grr is more straightforward to use, but I also haven't used git-review since 2014 when I first got frustrated enough to create grr.

I had let it bitrot since I wasn't doing as much code review and it seemed like Wikimedia was going to move away from Gerrit but both of those have changed now!

There's no user-facing changes, it was just a lot of internal refactoring that required breaking API changes, and then removing that API entirely because it was blocking further refactoring. Rewriting grr in Rust was one of my first Rust projects and the code really showed that. It's now cleaned up and I also dropped all the dependencies that linked to C code (OpenSSL/libgit2) to make builds easier and more portable.

Fundamentally, grr is a small wrapper around Gerrit's native functionality. I don't think it's widely known that submitting a patch to Gerrit is as straightforward as git push origin HEAD:refs/for/<branch>. And if you want to set a custom topic, you can append %topic=<...>.

So that's exactly what grr executes; but much shorter. To submit a patch just run: grr. (If you need to push to the non-primary branch, use grr <branch>.) And to pull down a patch for review, run grr fetch <id>. There's some more commands documented in the README.

Going back to the %topic= example, grr provides a --topic <...> option that turns into that. If you want to immediately set a Code-Review +2 vote when uploading (e.g. to automatically trigger CI to merge), you can provide --code-review=+2 (turns into %l=Code-Review+2).

To install, run cargo install --locked gerrit-grr. Pre-built binaries and an OCI image are also available.