What's New in Review Board

Review Board 1.7.19 is out, with some bug fixes and support for GitHub's two-factor authentication.

In recent days, there's been a large number of attempts to compromise accounts on GitHub. By activating two-factor authentication, you can better protect your account.

Review Board was lacking support for their two-factor authentication, which was a problem when linking an account for a repository for the first time. The workaround was to temporarily disable two-factor authentication, but that's no longer necessary. When linking an account with two-factor auth for the first time, GitHub will send you an access code, which Review Board will prompt you for.

If you have already linked a GitHub account, you won't have to do anything more. We use revokable OAuth tokens when talking to GitHub using a linked account, which is separate from your auth credentials.

Along with this, there's a page caching improvement for review request pages, some usability fixes, and other bug fixes.

See the release notes for more information.

Just over 11 months ago, we released Review Board 1.7, which was a major evolution to the product. It introduced features like the extensions, a new administration UI, file attachment reviews and thumbnails, an issue summary table, and quite a lot of UI polish.

It was a pretty good release, but we’re announcing something better. Review Board 2.0 is coming.

We’ve released the first beta today, and would like to encourage people to give it a try. (Please do not try with a production install or database, though.)

Here’s some of the highlights for this release.

• Create review requests from existing commits

  The “New Review Request” page has been completely redesigned. On supported repositories and hosting services, a list of branches and their commits will be shown. Each commit can be quickly put up for review with just a single click. If your team commits changes to a branch for review, this will help tremendously.

• Markdown in text fields

  All text fields (Description, Testing Done, comments, reviews) now accept Markdown. This makes it really easy to show off sample source code (with syntax highlighting!) right in comments, or to express things with bullet points, add links, add emphasis, or to just in general structure your review requests or reviews better.

  This won’t have any negative impact on any of your existing review requests or reviews, or your commit messages (when posting with rbt post or post-review). Only newly entered text will appear in Markdown.

• All new diff file index

  When viewing a diff, you’ll now get a much better idea of the complexity of the changes before you even look at code. The files are now each shown with a complexity graph, which is a little ring showing the relative number of inserts, deletes, and replaces, with the thickness of the ring indicating how much of the file has changed.

  Along with this, little color-coded dots are shown for every chunk, linking to the matching chunk. It also shows whether the file was renamed (and what its old name was), and whether it’s a newly introduced file or a deleted file.

  In our testing, we’ve found this very useful to help gauge how complex a change is before even digging into the change itself.

• More intuitive revision selector

  Our old revision selector was a hold-over from the early days. Not very nice to work with, and it took too long to switch revisions.

  The new one is much more intuitive, and works as a slider. Simply drag the handles to the revision you want, or the revisions for an interdiff, and the diff will immediately load below. It’s fast and simple.

• Less messy interdiffs

  Interdiffs are fantastic, but can become a mess if there have been other changes to a file between revisions that aren’t related to the change going up for review. Update your tree, post another change, view an interdiff, and you’ll see junk.

  No more. Interdiffs will, with few exceptions, only show what’s actually in your changes, making them more reliable than ever.

• Smarter moved code detection

  When moving code around a file, the diff viewer now does a better job both finding and showing blocks of code that have moved. They now appear as groups of moved lines, instead of a bunch of individually moved lines. It’s also better at not showing trivial moves.

• More polished, faster UI

  We’ve applied a lot more polish to the UI. The diff viewer, for instance, is a lot cleaner-looking. Many of the icons have been redone, and Retina versions have been created, so those of you on a MacBook Pro with a Retina display, you’re in for a treat.

• More powerful extensions

  Extension developers have a few new abilities to help in their creations. We’ve made it easy to package and test with static media files, right out of the box. We’ve also begun adding JavaScript-side extensions and hooks, which will make it easier in time to tie into more of the UI and operations in the browser.

• Better performance

  We’ve done a lot of work to reduce the amount of HTTP requests when accessing Review Board, to reduce reloads of pages (such as when publishing a reply or changing diff revisions), and reducing database queries throughout.

• And much more…

  A faster-loading Review dialog, better Git diff support, Markdown file review, file attachment thumbnails on comments, and many bug fixes.

We’re really excited about this release. It’s going to be amazing. This isn’t even all we’re doing for the release. By the time we ship 2.0, we expect to have support for image diffs and for extension-provided binary file diffs in the diff viewer. We’re working on a better layout for review requests. More extension support.

So give it a shot (on a test server!) and let us know how it goes!

For installation instructions and a full list of changes (with screenshots), see the release notes.

Unfortunately, yesterday's otherwise fantastic 1.7.17 release had a packaging snag that broke many installs. It's one we've seen before, and was due to a third-party tool we were using for building our JavaScript bundles, which has had a couple broken releases.

The new 1.7.18 release switches to using UglifyJS for JavaScript minification. This build should restore your installs to perfect working order.

Release notes are available.

We have a couple new releases of Review Board tonight. These both fix a couple security vulnerabilities discovered last night, and from this alone, we strongly recommend upgrading immediately.

The new 1.7.17 release also provides better GitHub integration, Local Site permissions, Extension improvements, and various bug fixes throughout the product.

Those using GitHub will have an easier time setting up new repositories (no more having to configure SSH keys!), and if anything goes wrong in the setup process, Review Board will do a better job of telling you what may be wrong.

If you're using the Local Sites feature, there's some improvements for you as well. Administrators of Local Sites will now have the ability to edit, close and reopen review requests, as well as post under another user's name, just like full-on administrators. These permissions are limited to Local Sites, of course.

We've also fixed some bugs around extensions. Enabling, disabling or changing an extension's settings will now cause the browser to re-fetch pages, instead of using old cached versions. Furthermore, extension customization now works with subdirectory installs.

The improvements in 1.7.17 are covered in more detail in the release notes.

If you're using the new Review Board Power Pack extension, or are looking to try it out, we recommend you update to 1.7.17. There are some fixes in this release that improve the interactivity with Power Pack.

If you're upgrading to 1.6.21, be sure to specify the version on the command line:

$ sudo easy_install ReviewBoard==1.6.21

Release notes:

• 1.6.21
• 1.7.17