RBTools 7.0 Release Notes¶

Release date: September 30, 2026

Installation¶

Follow our installation guide to install RBTools.

To learn more, see:

New and improved console output.

RBTools now uses rich for all console output. Commands show colorized status messages, tables, spinners, and progress bars. JSON output from --json is now syntax-highlighted.

Output is also cleaner when RBTools needs to prompt for input in the middle of a command. For example, if you run rbt post while logged out, progress output is hidden while the login prompt is shown.
Added a --color option to all commands.

This controls when colorized output is used. It accepts auto (the default), always, or never. This can also be set with the COLOR_MODE configuration key.

The standard NO_COLOR and FORCE_COLOR environment variables are also supported when the mode is auto.
Fill in more review request fields from commit messages.

When guessing fields, RBTools now parses the Testing Done and Bugs Closed fields out of commit messages, in addition to the summary and description. This matches the format written by rbt patch and rbt land, so changes can be round-tripped between Review Board and your repository.

Recognized field headers and Reviewed at <url> lines are stripped from the guessed description.

If your team uses different commit message conventions, you can set COMMIT_MESSAGE_PARSER to a custom function. Custom parsers can also provide the branch, depends on, target groups, and target people fields.

--close-type now accepts completed as the default close type.

This matches the terminology used in Review Board. submitted is still accepted.

Show drafts for review requests.

rbt info now shows the draft for unpublished review requests, and for published review requests when you are the submitter.

Improved progress output.

rbt post now shows a single spinner with the current task. A progress bar is added when validating or uploading multiple commits. When posting is complete, the spinner is replaced with the result.
--guess-fields now applies to all guessable fields.

This includes summary, description, testing done, bugs closed, and any additional fields provided by a custom COMMIT_MESSAGE_PARSER. When set, it takes precedence over --guess-summary and --guess-description.

Values provided explicitly on the command line always take precedence over guessed values.

Running a command with subcommands, such as rbt review or rbt status-update, without a subcommand now shows help text instead of crashing.

Fixed a crash when a review request has a repository but no published diffs.
A non-numeric or non-existent diff revision now shows a clear error, instead of the raw HTML of an error page.

Fixed a crash when applying patches with binary files that were posted with RBTools 5.x or older.

This also affected binary files that were not uploaded when posting, such as very large files.
Fixed applying patches with moved or copied binary files.

This mainly affected systems using Apple’s diff outside of Git repositories.
Fixed applying patches with moved binary files when using GNU patch 2.7 or newer.
Fixed a crash when using --json and a patch had conflicts.

Fixed rbt review add-diff-comment failing with “Could not find a file” on diffs containing more than 25 files.

Only the first page of files in the diff was searched when matching --filename. All pages are now searched.

Fixed diff paths when running inside a view entered with cleartool setview.

Paths were computed relative to the current directory, which caused file-not-found errors when posting. This could appear to happen at random, since the same change would post fine from a view entered through /view/tag.
Fixed label-based diffs, which previously treated every file as /main/0.
Improved performance of VOB lookups on installations with many regions and VOBs.

Fixed compatibility with Jujutsu 0.42 and newer.

Jujutsu 0.42 removed the --author option from jj describe. This broke setting the author when creating commits with rbt patch and rbt land.
Improved error messages for invalid revisions.

Passing a mistyped change ID or an empty revset to rbt diff or rbt post now shows the error reported by Jujutsu, instead of a generic error or crash.
Fixed a crash when a change had multiple fork points from the upstream branch.
Fixed creating unnecessary parent diffs in some cases.
Fixed using RBTools in workspaces that reference the main repository with a relative path.
Fixed rbt patch truncating newly-added files to zero bytes.
Fixed diffs for files with names containing fileset syntax characters, such as ,, (, |, or ~. This affected diffs when EXCLUDE_PATTERNS was set.
Fixed an extra blank line after index lines for added and deleted files in generated diffs.

The following features were deprecated in earlier releases and have now been removed.

Removed the rbtools.clients.base.patch module. Use rbtools.diffs.patches.PatchAuthor and rbtools.diffs.patches.PatchResult instead.
Removed the PatchAuthor and PatchResult forwarding classes from rbtools.clients.
Removed legacy patching support for SCMClients that only override apply_patch(). SCMClients must now set patcher_cls.
Removed BaseSCMClient.apply_patch_for_empty_files().
Removed the PatchAuthor.fullname property. Use PatchAuthor.full_name instead.
Patch no longer accepts a string for prefix_level.
PatchAuthor, PatchResult, guess_mimetype(), and CommandTestsMixin.create_command now require keyword arguments.

Added rbtools.utils.commit_messages, with parse_commit_message() and format_commit_message().
Added rbtools.ui.console.RBToolsConsole for rich console output in commands.

rbtools.utils.commands.extract_commit_message() has been moved to rbtools.utils.commit_messages.format_commit_message(). The old name will be removed in RBTools 9.
rbtools.utils.commands.STAMP_STRING_FORMAT has been moved to rbtools.utils.commit_messages.STAMP_STRING_FORMAT.
SCMClientCommitMessage is now an alias for ParsedCommitMessage. The alias will be removed in RBTools 9.