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Git and Gerrit in the School of Informatics
What are Git and Gerrit?
Git is a distributed version control system, originally developed by Linus Torvalds as a Linux kernel development tool.
Gerrit is a code review system, developed by Shawn Pearce for Google's Android Open Source Project. It allows a team of developers to push into a single Git repository, via a mechanism that both authenticates those developers and permits web-based management, examination, and comment upon proposed changes.
For many years, Informatics has offered a combined Git/Gerrit service and this service will continue for the foreseeable future. In parallel, we introduced an AFS backed git service which, through manipulation of AFS ACLs offers many of the advantages offered by Gerrit such as finely grained read and write access to repositories but is substantially easier to manage. In addition, users can create their own repositories directly. The one feature Gerrit offers which our "Git on AFS" service does not is code review. Note also that to push to the repository, users must be running an AFS client on their machine and must have an AFS identity with the appropriate permissions. The help page for the service goes into more detail.
If you simply must have code review or want to find out more about gerrit, see
If, on the other hand, you would like to find out more about the AFS backed Git service, follow this link