Review Board 6.0 Release Notes¶

A more polished look¶

We’ve been improving the look and feel of the product, softening the visuals, giving content some breathing room, sanding rough edges, and reworking the color palette and font size to make diffs easier to review.

This is a step toward a larger UI refresh planned for Review Board 7.

The new Unified Review Banner¶

In past versions of Review Board, your draft review requests, reviews, and replies were all managed separately, each with their own green draft banner.

Review Board 6 now includes a new Unified Review Banner, which summarizes every draft that still needs to be published on a review request.

This banner allows you to:

• See all your drafts in one place

• Publish all your drafts together with fewer e-mails, or publish them independently as before

• Create new reviews on a review request

This banner is always visible on the screen, and will help guide you through the review process.

The old Review, Add Comment, and Ship It! buttons on the review request’s action bar have been moved to a new Review menu on the banner, helping you create, manage, and publish your reviews from anywhere on a review request.

Markdown formatting toolbar¶

The new toolbar can help you format your text (bold, italic, strike-through, or code literals), create lists (numeric or bullet point), insert links, or upload images.

It’s shown any time you’re writing Markdown content, such as when leaving a comment, replying to a review, or filling out a review request field.

This was based on work by Hannah Lin.

Easier diff navigation¶

When reviewing diffs, the current file is now shown at the top of the page.

This can not only help you remember what file you’re looking at, but can be used to quickly jump to any other file in the diff.

Better file attachment management¶

When adding, updating, or deleting file attachments, a label is now placed on the thumbnail showing its status:

• New: The file attachment was newly-added in this draft.

• New Revision: A new, updated revision of a file attachment was added in this draft.

• Pending Deletion: The file attachment will be deleted when the draft is published.

• Draft: The file attachment’s caption has been updated in the draft.

If a file attachment is pending deletion, you can now restore it by clicking Undo Delete in the file attachment’s actions menu.

Helpful tips for composing reviews¶

Now, when creating or editing a review, the Review Dialog will show a slideshow of useful tips on reviewing in Review Board. This will teach you how to leave multi-line comments, comment on regions of images, publish drafts, and more.

Review your own drafts¶

Until now, Review Board has not allowed you to create comments on unpublished diffs or file attachments, because updating that data would end up deleting comments from the reviews.

This has now been changed so you can add review comments for drafts before those drafts are published. The resulting review request and review can then be published together using the Unified Review Banner.

This was tracked as Bug #831.

A better dashboard overview¶

Review Board 4.0 introduced the “Overview” tab for the dashboard, which effectively combines the incoming and outgoing views together (showing both things which are assigned to you as well as your own changes).

This is now the default view when opening the dashboard.

New Single Sign-On options¶

Users can now configure the NameID format and user attribute names for SAML-based Single Sign-On, helping them match the configuration in their Identity Providers.

Patches by Anes Mukhametov.

Service health checks¶

Review Board’s service health can now be monitored via the /health/ endpoint.

This can be used by monitoring servers, Kubernetes, Docker, etc. to verify that Review Board is up and running and can access its necessary services.

Only permitted IP addresses can access the health check URL. These can be set in HEALTHCHECK_IPS in your site directory’s conf/settings_local.py.

Learn more about health checks.

Plus…¶

• Our Docker images have been updated for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Python 3.11, and now support ARM64 architectures.

• Newly-generated Apache configurations support HTTP/2 by default.

  We strongly recommend updating your Apache or Nginx configuration for HTTP/2.

• Logging is enabled by default on new installs.

• The list of commits on a review request and the diff viewer now show the commit IDs.

• Repository lists in the administration UI now show more information on the repository backends.

Server-Side Python Extensions¶

• Reworked support for adding actions.

  Review Board’s extension framework has had a concept of actions for a long time, for adding your custom features to review requests or to the navigation bar on each page. The implementations for these were spread out among several different extension hooks with varying levels of functionality. These have all been replaced with a new generic framework.

  Extensions can now define their own actions to attach to various hook points on the page (for example, the header, the review request, or the review banner).

  Actions can be placed into menus, such as in the new Review menu or user menu at the top of the page. Menu items can be reordered. Separators can be added to visually distinguish between groups of actions.

  Actions can be explicitly hidden using HideActionHook, making it easier to disable existing features or replace them with your own custom implementations.

• Added experimental support for pytest-based unit tests.

  rbext test can now use pytest as the test runner with the --pytest argument. Pytest is a modern unit test runner with a large ecosystem of plugins, and is the go-to choice for many Python codebases.

  This will become the default in Review Board 7.

• Running rbext without any parameters will now output helpful instructions.

• Custom SCMTools (repository implementations) can now store extra_data on a draft review request when parsing a changeset.

  This allows additional data about a changeset to be stored for later use.

• Switched our extension support to use modern Python packaging support.

  Tools for working with Python packages have changed significantly in the past few years. We’ve updated all of Review Board to move from the legacy tooling to modern tooling.

  This is a large behind-the-scenes change, but it shouldn’t have any noticeable change in functionality. If your extension package no longer works, please reach out to support.

• Improved Python type hinting.

  We’re continually adding Python type hints to the Review Board codebase, helping you develop Python extension code in your IDE. Each release brings us closer to 100% type hint coverage.

  If you maintain extensions, you may want to consider integrating tools such as mypy or pyright into your workflow.

Client-Side JavaScript Extensions¶

• TypeScript, ES Modules, and Spina support for JavaScript extensions.

  TypeScript is now available to extension authors, helping you write type-safe, maintainable code. Review Board 6 currently supports TypeScript 4.9, though you can include newer versions in your codebase.

  Extensions can also make use of JavaScript Modules to export and import code. This is available automatically when writing JavaScript files with .es6.js extensions, or when writing TypeScript files.

  We’ve also introduced Spina, a modern, TypeScript-first replacement for Backbone.js. You can use Spina to help write your extension-related classes. We’re in the process of moving all of Review Board’s client code to Spina.

• Added FileAttachmentThumbnailContainerHook for adding file attachment thumbnail menu items.

  This can be used to place new items in a file attachment thumbnail’s pop-out menu, giving extensions the ability to perform operations on a file attachment.

Administration¶

• Fixed the sort order when selecting items in conditions for integrations.

Dashboard¶

• Fixed the appearance of the pencil icon for editing dashboard columns.

Diff Viewer¶

• Fixed showing the content of deleted files in diffs.

• Fixed a bug copying content from diffs to the clipboard.

• Red borders around unexpected syntax in files have been removed.

  While not technically a bug, it led to more confusion than anything, and was never really intended as a true feature. We now show the diff without these indicators.

File Attachments¶

• Deleting a draft file attachment will now delete the thumbnails or other related files as well.

• Discarding a draft review request with new file attachments will now delete those file attachments.

• Fixed some browser caching bugs where stale file attachment data could be shown in the review request.

• Fixed a visual glitch when setting empty captions on file attachments.

• Attempting to make a comment on a file attachment that’s deleted now displays a helpful message.

Privacy¶

• Fixed a crash that could occur when calculating privacy consent options.

  This did not impact privacy in any way. It’s purely a bug that could lead to a crash when web servers were starting up new threads, due to a race condition.

Repositories¶

• Remote Git repositories can no longer be configured without a Raw File URL for accessing file contents.

  Git doesn’t provide any way to remotely fetch the contents of files across a network, meaning we require a hosting service (such as GitHub, GitLab, or RB Gateway). We work around that with a “Raw File URL”, which is a URL to a GitWeb-like service for fetching the contents of a file.

  We now require the Raw File URL for all remote Git repositories.

• Improved GitHub error handling when encountering a connection/networking error.

• Subversion repositories configured with a filesystem path are no longer allowed.

  URLs are required for Subversion. We now require file:// if using a filesystem path.

• Fixed reporting errors with Bazaar/Breezy when Python modules are missing.

• Fixed crashes when failing to load hosting service backends.

  This could occur if disabling an extension that provided the hosting service backend. Now, more suitable error messages should be displayed.

Review Requests¶

• Opening and closing the editor for the change description field no longer causes a visual jump in the page layout.

• Fixed issues when interacting with a review request across multiple browser tabs or windows.

  We’ve had a long-standing bug where if a review was discarded from one tab, attempts to create or edit comments on that review from another tab would result in errors. This bug became easier to hit in Review Board 6.

  Now, when discarding or publishing a review in one, other tabs within the same browser/device will be forced to reload.

  In the future, we plan to synchronize state instead of prompting to reload. For now, this helps avoid these long-standing bugs and keep your reviews in a good state.

• Very long commit messages in the diff viewer commits table no longer affect the width of the page. (Bug #4891).

  Patch by Sandy Saji.

• Fixed a small visual glitch when hovering over the edit icon for review request descriptions.

• Fixed an issue where a click could sometimes be ignored on a review request text field.

  This could happen if the mouse cursor position moves slightly when clicking, indicating a possible drag.

• Fixed repeated reloads of the Issue Summary Table while automated code reviews are running.

• The Commits section on a review request is now hidden if it would otherwise be empty.

Single Sign-On¶

• When redirected to the login page, logging in with SSO would end up loading the dashboard instead of the intended page.

  The redirect URL is now properly loaded after the SSO flow.