We have a few exciting announcements today!
Power Pack 4 and RBTools 3 are now available. There’s a few big features to cover, and we’d like to start with VersionVault and ClearCase.
HCL VersionVault and IBM ClearCase
HCL VersionVault and IBM Rational ClearCase are enterprise source code management products, built for distributed teams that need to collaborate on very large projects.
Power Pack 4 ships support for both VersionVault and ClearCase repositories, allowing your teams across the world to collaborate on code reviews and document reviews.
To get started:
- Install Review Board 4.0.5 (or newer)
- Install Power Pack 4 on the Review Board server
- Download a Power Pack trial license or purchase a license
- Configure your repositories (each can map to one or more VOBs)
- Have your developers install the RBTools 3 command line tools to post changes for review
You can then post code for review using rbt post, and review it right from your Review Board server.
Power Pack is a licensed add-on to Review Board. You can buy a license for as many or as few users as needed. A user must be licensed to post changes for review, but anybody can review posted changes.
Please note, this replaces the old, legacy community-driven ClearCase implementation found in Review Board. You’ll want to select “VersionVault / ClearCase” when setting up your new repositories.
For more information, see the documentation on:
Database Import/Export
There are times when you may want to take the content from one Review Board server and move it to another. The simplest way to do this is just to copy the database, but there are some times when that will not suffice:
- You want to export only a subset of the content (for example, if part of a business is being spun-out or acquired).
- You want to combine two separate Review Board instances into one.
- You want to change database backend types (for example, moving from MySQL to Postgres).
Power Pack 4’s new import/export feature makes it easy to handle these kinds of scenarios by exporting a full or partial Review Board server into a database-agnostic bundle, which can then be imported into a new or existing server.
Power Pack 4 must be installed to perform the export or the import, but at this time, a license is not required to use the feature.
See the Import/Export documentation for instructions.
RBTools 3
Along with support for VersionVault and ClearCase, the all-new RBTools 3 has some new capabilities to help you build your own solutions around Review Board.
JSON Output
All commands now accept a --json argument, which will cause the command to output a JSON document showing if the command was successful or listing any errors.
Many commands (including rbt post, rbt land, rbt status-update, and rbt status) provide additional information, built to help you integrate RBTools into your own scripts.
See the documentation for each command for their JSON schemas.
We are still working to improve the JSON output. If you use this feature, please let us know what would be useful to you!
rbt review
The new rbt review command allows you to construct reviews, add comments, and publish or discard, right from the command line or scripts.
This is intended to help with in-house automation around Review Board. We’re still improving this command, so once again, let us know if you find it useful and want to see any improvements.
Let’s Get Started!
Ready to set up VersionVault/ClearCase? Or play with RBTools’s new JSON output or review automation? Or prepare for some data migration?
Upgrade to Power Pack 4 and RBTools 3 to take advantage of all these new features.
To see the full list of changes, see the Power Pack 4 release notes and RBTools 3 release notes.