What's New in Review Board

We identified a pretty major regression in 2.5.11, and wanted to quickly get a follow-up release out for you. Some changes to our repository communication code resulted in a crash when forming a HTTP header used for several hosting services. This has been fixed, and things should work well once again.

We've also fixed an issue that could occur when sending e-mails for review requests that modify large numbers of files. We send a X-ReviewBoard-Diff-For header that lists the files, for filtering purposes, but some e-mail servers had issues with the length of this header. We've now capped this to ensure e-mails are sent reliably.

It's a small release, but the release notes are available.

If you missed it, check out the 2.5.11 release notes for all the performance improvements, bug fixes, and features we shipped last night.

We spent the past month going through Review Board and finding ways we could make the product faster and feel smoother. Posting and reviewing changes, being the sole purpose of the product, seemed like a pretty good place to start, so we got cracking.

Along the way, we've improved our support for LDAP, Perforce, and touchscreens, and fixed a handful of bugs.

Faster diff uploads

With today's release of Review Board 2.5.11, we've rewritten our diff parsers to be able to handle very large diffs (10 megabytes in size) in a second or two, using less memory in the process. This used to take a lot longer for some diffs. These performance benefits of course extend to smaller diffs as well.

If you're posting existing commits for review in the New Review Request page, you'll find that what used to take seconds is now nearly instantaneous. We've substantially cut down on the work needed here.

Using Perforce? We've changed how we're managing login sessions and fetching information about files in the repository. On larger Perforce installations, you'll see a huge performance benefit here.

A faster, smoother diff viewer

We've polished up the diff viewer, fixing a lot of perceived and actual performance problems. Large diffs that used to swamp the browser can now be viewed without problems. Resizing the window, which used to feel choppy in some browsers, is now silky-smooth.

Firefox users will especially notice an improvement here, as we've cut down on the work the browser needs to do in order to render the page.

Faster search indexing

Some nasty performance bugs in search indexing have been squashed. Indexes that used to take 30 minutes may now only take 2-5 minutes.

Fixed touchscreen support when reviewing changes

We've fixed a lot of bugs with our touchscreen support. Using an iPad or another tablet, you can now make comments spanning multiple lines of a diff, position and resize the comment dialog, and leave comments without triggering key bindings (oops).

And there's plenty more

• Better support for Assembla repositories
• Fixes for user lookups on LDAP
• API improvements
• Performance and usability enhancements in the dashboard
• Fixes for regressions in the search field
• Stability fixes for extensions and repository communication
• Fixed issues upgrading from Review Board 1.7 or older

See the release notes for the entire list of changes, and let us know how the release is working out for you!

Today's release of RBTools 0.7.10 some important compatibility fixes for macOS, Git, Subversion, Team Foundation Server, ClearCase.

macOS and Browser Windows

macOS users who have upgraded to recent releases of Sierra lost the ability to run rbt post --open (to open the posted review request in a browser window) due to a Python/AppleScript bug. This is Python bug #30392, for those who are interested.

We've worked around this. Your default browser will work once again. Thanks to those who pointed this out!

There's also a whole new macOS installer coming that should actually work on all setups. We'll have this on the Downloads page once it gets a little more testing.

Git and Git-SVN

Git-SVN users should no longer encounter crashes when trying to post changes for review. That was pretty disruptive.

Git repositories with submodules containing pending changes no longer cause warnings about dirty repositories when posting changes. They're not included anyway, and just added to the confusion.

Crazy Subversion Diffs

If you had a line of code being deleted that happened to look like a diff header (say, --- XX (YY)), it could cause some code we have for fixing up diffs to get very confused. That, unfortunately, could lead to lines being excluded from the diff, breaking when you try viewing it in the diff viewer.

We've rewritten this code to be very careful about these lines. It won't get confused again.

Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio 2017

Team Foundation Server users who have upgraded to Visual Studio 2017 can once again post changes. TFS has had a nasty habit of changing their file formats, APIs, and command line options, but after much tearing out of the hair, we've restored compatibility.

All versions from Visual Studio 2011 onward should work just fine, so no need to upgrade to 2017 just to use this release.

We've also fixed a regression when using the Team Explorer Everywhere adapter.

ClearCase and Cross-Platform VOB Lookups

ClearCase users can now name their repositories in Review Board based on a component of a VOB path, instead of naming it based on the entire VOB path. This helps with the differences in how ClearCase represents VOB paths on different platforms. For instance, a VOB path of /vobs/MyVOB or C:\vobs\MyVOB will now match a repository name of MyVOB.

There are also some performance improvements for looking up VOBs.

And Other Such Things

There are improvements to the Python API, such as not prematurely exiting the process, plus compatibility fixes for Review Board 3.0. We've also added a new config option to disable certain warnings in RBTools, which would be especially useful for repository hook scripts.

For the complete list of changes, see the release notes.

To upgrade RBTools, visit the downloads page.