What's New in Review Board

Some last-minute brokenness snuck into alpha 3, so we're releasing a quick alpha 4 that should fix it. If you installed alpha 3, upgrade immediately.

Bugs Fixed:

• post-review should now work with SVN regardless of the locale set. (Bug #888)
• Fixed an infinite loop in the Git diff parser. Patch by Dennis Schön. (Bug #887)
• The first file in the diff viewer would sometimes come back as escaped HTML. It's now embedded correctly.
• The comment dialog's "dirty" state wasn't being reset for new comments. This would leave reviewers unable to make new comments.

Review Board 1.0 alpha 3 has just been released. This release fixes a few major bugs introduced by 1.0 alpha 2 (over-aggressive caching primarily) and several browser-compatibility problems. Safari and Internet Explorer both had compatibility issues with some of the features we introduced, and we've since worked around them.

To upgrade from a previous alpha, just run:

$ sudo easy_install -U ReviewBoard
$ rb-site upgrade /path/to/site

A full summary of the changes are below:

Bugs Fixed in rb-site:

• Generated settings_local.py files no longer have DEBUG=True enabled by default.
• The generated FastCGI and Apache config files should now work better out of the box. We had path issues in reviewboard.fcgi. We also now set the PYTHON_EGG_CACHE directory and default to processing .htaccess files in htdocs (which some distros don't have enabled by default).

Bugs Fixed in the Diff Viewer:

• Fixed some major performance issues when typing in the diff viewer. This was the cause of many reports of slowdown and visual oddities when creating comments.
• Unchanged files should no longer show errors in interdiffs.
• Fixed file-based navigation ("<" and ">" keys) in the diff viewer. (Bug #696)
• We no longer show a nonsensical error when SVN logins fail. (Bug #721)
• Fixed anchors in the diff viewer. (Bug #828)
• Fixed the "Expand/Collapse Diffs" toggle in the diff viewer. (Bug #862)

Bugs Fixed in Reviews:

• The review request page is no longer cached across login sessions. We were over-aggressive in the caching and are now a lot more careful.
• Upload Diff/Screenshot dialogs on Safari are now centered instead of being docked to the far-left side.
• Uploading diffs and screenshots now works on Safari.
• Empty Changeset errors in Perforce should now properly be shown to the user. They were in some cases triggering a server-side error.
• The Change Description field no longer animates open on page load.
• Sentences containing the word "bug" or "issue" no longer generate links unless followed by either specifically a number or a "#" followed by alphanumeric characters.
• Fixed some escaping issues in the review request summary, which would cause characters (such as quotes) to appear incorrectly. (Bug #860)
• Fixed some issues with auto-linking text in the Description and Testing Done fields. There were issues on initial page loads with linking URLs that were followed by quotes, "<" and ">". (Bug #864)

Feature Improvements:

• We now pre-load the first file on a page in the diff viewer, in order to make it appear that the page is loading faster. Many people felt the new, faster diff viewer was slower because even after the initial page load, they had to wait to see any diffs. They're now able to work with the first diff the moment the diff viewer loads.
• Added hover/clicked styling for the review request action buttons.

We've just put out a release of Review Board 1.0 alpha 2. This release has some major improvements and bug fixes over alpha 1, and we recommend that everybody upgrades.

The main improvements are performance-related. We've added aggressive browser-side caching support, as well as reorganized load times in our pages in order to reduce load times. The diff viewer now loads almost instantly and then progressively loads diffs on the fly, meaning you can start reviewing right away.

If you have mod_expires and mod_deflate (Apache) or mod_gzip (lighttpd) enabled, you'll see the cache and load time improvements. Apache users will get the new configuration for taking advantage of this for free, but if you're a lighttpd user, you'll need to update your configuration based on our lighttpd.conf template.

Going forward, upgrades using easy_install will not grab nightlies. They will only be grabbing stable releases. If you want to continue using nightlies, please refer to the Getting Started guide.

A full summary of the changes in this release are below:

Bugs Fixed in post-review:

• We now strip the filename coming in from Perforce. There can be a trailing newline sometimes, resulting in a failed upload. (Bug #726)
• We set the correct locale now when invoking svn. Patch by Łukasz Jernaś. (Bug #822)
• Fixed backwards version comparison logic in post-review's GitClient. Patch by Stacey Sheldon.
• Added support for hgsubversion. Patch by Augie Fackler
• Added support for Clearcase. Patch by Daniel Belz.

Bugs Fixed in rb-site:

• rb-site now sets "postgresql_psycopg2" as the DATABASE_ENGINE for PostgreSQL installs. Patch by Rusty Burchfield. (Bug #822)
• rb-site should now generate config files that work correctly on Windows servers.

Bugs Fixed in Review Board:

• Whitespace from usernames are now stripped on LDAP accounts, which prevents duplicate user accounts in the database. (Bug #728)
• Fixed a bug where anchors in comment flags were incorrect and were getting lost when setting the comment count for the flag. This was breaking anchors to parts of the diff. (Bug #820)
• The fields in the comment dialog are now disabled if the user is not logged in. (Bug #827)
• Key presses in dialogs or in the review request details box no longer trigger navigation in the diff viewer. (Bug #828)
• The "Review" link on a review request is no longer displayed if the user is not logged in.
• Trailing whitespace wasn't shown in diff fragments on the review request page.
• Trailing whitespace wasn't always shown in the diff viewer, if it appeared in the middle of a comment block.
• Removed some old YUI files that were still in the repository.

Feature Improvements:

• Improved lighttpd and Apache+fastcgi support. A Review Board install using either lighttpd or Apache+fastcgi should now work out of the box without setting up any custom scripts for launching fastcgi.
• The diff fragments placeholders in the review request page are now set to the same size as the fragment itself. This means that progressively loaded fragments should no longer cause the page to jump nearly as much, resulting in a smoother loading experience.
• When displaying the Review form, we now make sure that the form is scrolled to the top. This fixes a bug where the page was often scrolled to the bottom of the list of comments.
• Several improvements were made to Bazaar support. We now use bzrlib and support revid information in the diff header.
• The comment dialog is now slightly wider and has slightly smaller text, resulting in more room for comments.

New Features:

• Load times for nearly all parts of Review Board have greatly increased. The browser is now instructed to aggressively cache media files and many pages, meaning fewer downloads when going to any particular page.

  We optimize the order in which resources are loaded in order to take advantage of the browser's ability to parallelize downloads of similar resources types (such as CSS files or JavaScript).

  The results of these files are GZip'd to further increase transfer speeds.

  Apache users will get these improvements for free. lighttpd users will need to upgrade their lighttpd config file based on the template provided with Review Board in the contrib/conf/ directory.

  On top of this, we now use jQuery 1.3.1, which is many times faster than the previous version of jQuery we were using, and we also have a number of improvements such as progressive loading of the diff viewer.

• Added progressive loading of the diff viewer. This is one of the main features of this release. Regardless of the size of the diff, the diff viewer now loads quickly, and loads each file's diff progressively. This gives people the ability to review code before all the diffs have even been generated.

  This also fixes some major scalability issues we've had with large diffs. In theory, it's now possible to review very large diffs that span many pages.

• Added support for linkifying pieces of text in the Description and Testing Done fields. (Issue #258)

  The following formats are supported:

  • URLs
  • /r/123 numbers (even /r/123/diff and such)
  • bug/issue numbers (in the form of "bug abc123", "bug #abc123", "issue abc123" and "issue #abc123")
• Added support for Clearcase repositories. This depends on a mounted view on the Review Board server. Patch by Daniel Belz.

Back in the early days of Review Board, just before we were set to announce, I threw together a little website for the project. We were small then, with just a few users (no companies outside VMware, really), and the website didn't need to have much.

We've grown considerably since then, and the website was starting to feel really stuffy and outdated. It also wasn't built to handle some of the things we have planned for it, such as a documentation browser in the site or community features for third party developers and users. So, I decided it was time to give the site a makeover.

The new site is a lot cleaner and leaves room to breathe. There's still more planned for the site, and there's probably a few breakages here and there, but it's a definite improvement over the old one.

In the next week, I hope to begin bringing new parts of the site online. We also have a 1.0 alpha 2 release planned.

If you find any breakages, please let us know.