* It's a Ruby on Rails codebase with lots of gem
dependencies and a
reputation for being hard to install (haven't tried it).
I can vouch for this in a limited fashion, I spent around an hour one
day trying to get it working, and gave up. This has been my experience
with 90% of Ruby projects, however, so I wouldn't judge Gitorious for
this. I had similar trouble with Barkeep. I was only barely able to get
Diaspora running.
* Like GitHub/Gerrit, it's not just a code review
tool, but also
manages repositories.
The advantage over Gerrit is that Gitorious also has project wikis
(however useful that is over
mw.org), and the disadvantage behind GitHub
is that it doesn't have an issue tracker (though
bz.wm.org should
suffice as always).
* Unlike GitHub/Gerrit, it has no easy way to
integrate merge requests
-- developers have to do so manually using git commands (see the "how
to apply this merge request" box in the page above). The process seems
particularly cumbersome for small patchsets, of which we get a lot.
This is possibly the most troublesome thing about it all--it would
require manual rebase/merge before being able to accept a patch. That
would certainly be a blocker, I'd say, but it might be possible to port
the auto-merge and the revered "rebase button" from Gerrit over to
Gitorious. Maybe a bit of effort, but it could be worth it.
[We could d]rink the kool-aid and join the wonderful
semi-open world of GitHub,
with all the risks and benefits it entails.
This is quite a nasty flavor of Kool-Aid, I'd say--but having more
contributors, accomplished by whatever means, might be worth it. If
there is a free alternative, and we are able to live with it (be it
Gerrit, Barkeep, Phabricator, or whatever else), that seems like the
better option to me right now.
Just a couple of pennies,
--
Mark Holmquist
Contractor, Wikimedia Foundation
mtraceur(a)member.fsf.org
http://marktraceur.info