I’ve been working with GitHub for my projects and now I want to integrate Gerrit for code reviews. However, I’m concerned about potential issues since Gerrit relies on JGit implementation.
I came across some warnings about JGit being a Java-based Git reimplementation that might not be as reliable as the standard Git binaries. There were mentions of possible repository corruption issues, though they’re typically fixable due to Git’s distributed nature.
Has anyone here successfully used Gerrit with GitHub? What has been your experience with this setup? Are the reliability concerns about JGit something I should worry about in practice?
We integrated Gerrit with our GitHub workflow about two years ago and it’s been pretty smooth. Yeah, we talked a lot about JGit reliability issues before jumping in, but honestly haven’t hit any of the corruption problems people complain about online. Just keep solid backups and make sure your Gerrit setup has enough resources. Your team will need to adjust since Gerrit works differently than GitHub’s pull requests. Developers have to learn the Change-Id system and push-for-review process. But the code review features have really boosted our code quality, and those JGit stability fears never became real issues for us in production.
I’ll share the flip side - we actually ditched Gerrit after 18 months and went back to pure GitHub. The JGit issues weren’t as bad as expected, but the workflow got way too complex. We had to constantly sync between GitHub and Gerrit, which confused developers who were used to GitHub’s normal flow. Ended up with this messy hybrid where some teams used Gerrit reviews and others stuck with GitHub PRs. Total inconsistency. The admin overhead killed us too - managing permissions across both systems and babysitting integration scripts ate up way more DevOps time than we planned. We finally just switched to GitHub’s advanced review features and branch protection. Got 90% of what we needed without the headache.
i’ve been usin gerrit with github for a while and honestly, the jgit worries aren’t as bad as ppl say. just keep your setup updated and you’ll be fine. so far, no repo corruptions on my end, so that’s a plus!