We’re excited to announce the first beta of Review Board 6! This is a smaller release focusing on improvements to the review workflow by giving you a new starting point for creating reviews and the ability to bulk-publish drafts of reviews, replies, and review requests.
If you’re new to Review Board, it’s a free, open source, extensible web-based code review and document review tool, helping developers work together to ensure quality code on their projects, whether using Git, Mercurial, Perforce, Subversion, ClearCase, or other current or future source code management tools.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the key changes in this beta.
The New Review Banner
Since the beginning, Review Board has represented drafts of new reviews, replies, or review request changes as a green draft banner at the top of the screen. Each draft had its own banner, and each draft had to be published separately.
We’re now introducing a new unified banner, which shows everything you have in flight on a review request.
From here, you can:
- Start or edit reviews from anywhere on the page (replacing the old “Review” and “Ship It” buttons).
- File general comments pertaining to the review request as a whole (replacing the old “Add Comment” button).
- Switch between drafts, if you want to publish one independently.
- Bulk-publish all reviews, replies, and pending changes on a review request at once, resulting in fewer button clicks and e-mails.
The banner is always present on a review request. You can use the Review menu to create a brand-new blank review, file a general comment, or quickly file a Ship It! review:
There’s more coming. In beta 2, the new banner will show you your active file in a diff and let you jump to other files.
Learn more about the new review banner.
We’re opening this up to extension authors. Soon, extensions will be able to add new information and sections to the banner, giving your organization more control over your review workflow.
Also For Extension Authors
Extension authors also have a few new goodies in this release:
- We’ve reworked our actions framework, which manages the buttons that can be found on a review request, the review banner, and the page header. It’s now easier to add, replace, or remove actions and tailor the product to your needs.
- We’re adding Python Type Hints throughout our codebase, making it easier for your IDE to ensure you’re calling our internal APIs correctly.
- Client-side extensions can now be written in TypeScript and use ES6 modules. Simply declare an
index.tsfile in your JavaScript bundle, and use that to write any TypeScript code or import from TypeScript modules. - You can also now use modern ES6 classes for your JavaScript/TypeScript code. We’ve introduced a new library called Spina to help create these, working as a drop-in replacement for the old Backbone.JS.
We’ll have documentation on all this before the final 6.0 is released.
Plus…
- The dashboard now defaults to the “Overview” view, which shows all your incoming and outgoing review requests.
- We’ve changed “Close -> Submitted” to “Close -> Completed,” removing some old and confusing Perforce-centric terminology.
- Numerous behind-the-scenes improvements for improving performance, architecture, and stability.
See the 6.0 beta 1 release notes for the full list of changes.
Want to Help Us Test?
We’d love to have your help! We have installation information in the release notes.
Please make sure you have a dedicated testing server and database. Do not test this beta in production!
You can use the beanbag/reviewboard:6.0b1 Docker image as well. See our Docker instructions for information on setting up an environment.