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up vote 4 down vote favorite

By definition, with open source everybody can look at the source.

But what are the tools/collaboration methods that are better suited for a distributed code review of an open source project?

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This seems very much like a duplicate of codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/21/… – Mark Loeser Jan 20 '11 at 13:27
Sort of: if we interpret it as "what tools work for reviews without a central server", the scope is kinda different (I actually don't know any tools like that ATM). – TryPyPy Jan 20 '11 at 14:29
For me the focus of that question was "what to do when you got no money and possible very limited resources to spend". F.e. github is a great for open source projects but deploying git for a bit company might go a totally different direction – edorian Jan 20 '11 at 14:34
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this is valid question. And is sufficiently different from the referenced question in the first comment because OP is asking a very specific question about a review tool/solution. Whereas the referenced question is very generic. – cbrulak Jan 20 '11 at 16:38
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Questions about the discipline, practice, and tools for code reviews should be posted to programmers.stackexchange.com. This site is for sharing code from projects you're working on to get peer feedback and review. – Robert Cartaino♦ Jan 21 '11 at 15:45

closed as off topic by Mark Loeser, Inaimathi, Robert Cartaino♦ Jan 21 '11 at 15:45

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4 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Gerrit seems to be a well working solution for Git based projects.

(All the refered examples are for the andriod development, YMMV)

It also features nice workflow documentation what i find to be especially valuable in open source environments. Additionally it offer guidelines on how to submit patches.

Have a look at the interface.

Something like Reviewboard is also a nice alternative.

But these tools require a centralized server and since you asked for Distributed code review: I can't think of anything more 'distributed' than a simple commit mailinglist.

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Gerrit isn't a service though, is it? You have to run your own server right? – cbrulak Jan 20 '11 at 17:16
up vote 3 down vote

If you're considering hosting your code on Google Code, it has some code review tools.

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up vote 1 down vote

Bigger code changes of an open-source code base are usually triggered by, and tracked in a ticket. You attach patches to the ticket so that people who care about these changes can review the current state of the patch. After several persons gave their ok in the comments, the ticket is marked as "ready-to-checkin" and someone with the commit-bit can checkin the patch.

The main issue here is to convince the core-committers to also follow this policy instead of directly developing in trunk. Otherwise they would circumvent the code review, making the whole concept useless.

Django is following this method in most cases and it seems to workout pretty well.

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up vote 1 down vote

Has anyone tried http://howsmycode.com ? I did but my github repos are private and its not really working at the moment. I actually don't know if it is active development or not.

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