Review Board 2.0 RC 2 Release Notes¶
Release date: April 2, 2014
This release contains all bug fixes and features found in Review Board version 1.7.22.
Installation¶
To install this release, run the following:
$ sudo easy_install \
-f http://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/ReviewBoard/2.0/ \
-U ReviewBoard
We are very close to the final release of 2.0. If you are intending to run 2.0 on a production server, it is time to do some testing with this release to make sure we address any bugs you may run into.
If you are careful with backups, you may run this on a production server, but you may experience bugs. It is best to install on a test server first, in case there are any major problems.
Important Upgrade Notes¶
Make a backup of your database!
Substantial changes were made to database migration. While our testing has shown it to work, it could leave your database in a bad state.
Do not upgrade a production database without a full backup.
Please let us know if you have any problems with the upgrade.
New Features¶
Admin Widget Reordering¶
The widgets in the administration dashboard can now be reordered through drag-and-drop. This allows admins to choose which widgets they want to see near the top of the page, and which they want to keep further down.
This is the first step toward customization of the administration UI. In future releases, administrators will be able to add or remove widgets, and extensions will be able to provide new widgets.
Patch by Stephanie Su.
Option to Disable Gravatars¶
The Gravatars shown in the top header bar, user infobox, and user page’s sidebar can now be disabled through a “Use Gravatar images” setting in the General Settings page.
This is useful for environments that are locked down and don’t allow access to the Internet.
Experimental Post-Receive Hook for GitHub¶
We are testing a new post-receive webhook for GitHub, which we’ll expand upon in upcoming releases.
This webhook can be used to close review requests referenced in pushed
commits. To use this, you’ll need to edit the settings for your repository on
GitHub, add a WebHook entry, choose a JSON payload, and enter the hook URL.
This URL is in the form of
http://<server>/repos/<repo_id>/hooks/github/post-receive/, where
repo_id is the numeric ID of your repository (available in the
administration UI).
Note that this requires your server be reachable over the Internet by GitHub’s servers.
The hook will then look for all commits with:
Reviewed at http://<server>/r/<id>/
or:
Review request #<id>
If found, the review request will be closed with a reference to the committed revisions and branches.
Future versions will introduce hooks for additional services, and improve the setup process.
Patches by Anselina Chia and Bhushan Ramnani.
Improvements to rb-site¶
Simpler Installs¶
rb-site install has a new stream-lined installation experience. It now asks fewer questions, focusing on handling common installations using Apache, mod_wsgi, and memcached. This reduces the number of questions you have to answer.
Passing --advanced will cause all original questions to be
presented.
Management Commands for Extensions¶
Three new rb-site manage commands have been added to manage the
list of enabled extensions: list-extensions, enable-extension, and
disable-extension.
list-extensions will list all the extensions that Review Board currently
knows about, as well as their enabled states.
enable-extension and disable-extension take an extension ID and can
enable or disable the given extension, which is helpful when an extension has
broken the installation.
Removed Features¶
rb-site install no longer provides a graphical interface when run on Linux desktops. This was removed to provide consistency and attention around the text-based install, and to reduce the maintenance and bug count.
Usability Improvements¶
Added a red glow around opened but unfocused field editors on review requests. (Bug #3242)
It was easy to miss that a field was open for edit but not saved, which could lead to lost data or warnings when leaving the page. There’s now a red glow around these fields to help highlight what’s still open.
Added confirmation when discarding a review request. (Bug #3117)
It was easy to accidentally close a review request as discarded instead of submitted, which then required re-publishing before closing again.
Now, closing as discarded will first prompt for confirmation, in order to ensure it wasn’t chosen by accident.
Patch by Anselina Chia.
Performance Improvements¶
Improved query time of lists of review requests when one or more are private.
Extensibility¶
Authentication Backends¶
Custom User Filtering¶
An AuthBackend.search_users() method was added, which is called when
querying a list of users using the API. This function can override the query
to perform a lookup with the provided query string in whatever way is most
appropriate for the backend.
This can be used, for example, to filter out users not matching certain criteria, or to change which fields are matched.
Patch by Mark Côté.
Bug Fixes¶
New Review Request Page¶
Fixed creating review requests from Subversion commits in the New Review Request page when using the new Subvertpy backend.
Diff Viewer¶
File Attachments¶
Text files encoded with UTF-16le no longer cause breakages when generating thumbnails. (Bug #3282)
Repository Configuration¶
Added back the “Show SSH Public Key” link for new repositories. (Bug #3262)
rb-site¶
The rb-site manage command once again allows running management commands from extensions.
rb-site install gracefully handles issues when failing to create a database, allowing the user to fix the issue and try again without recreating the whole site. (Bug #2126)
GitLab¶
Fixed e-mail-based authentication on older versions of GitLab.
Patch by Tomi Äijö.
LDAP¶
Fixed porting over LDAP settings from older installations. This had regressed in 2.0 beta 3.
Patch by Stephen Gallagher.
Other Changes¶
Added some bullet-proofing when failing to load settings from the database.
Fixed some issues using the site (particularly the dashboard) when using a multi-threaded web server or loader such as Apache’s mod_worker.
Contributors¶
Anselina Chia
Bhushan Ramnani
Christian Hammond
David Trowbridge
Mark Côté
Stephanie Su
Stephen Gallagher
Tomi Äijö