What's New in Review Board

Power Pack 1.3 is out, and builds upon the recently-introduced integration with Microsoft Team Foundation Server by adding support for TFS Git repositories.

You can now add a TFS Git repository to Review Board simply by configuring a new repository, selecting "Team Foundation Server (git)", and entering your repository's clone URL. Seconds later, your team can begin posting changes using RBTools.

This release also contains a variety of bug fixes for licensing and for reviewing PDF documents. Highly recommended for all existing Power Pack users.

As a reminder, Power Pack is now free for up to 2 users. Get started with a 30 day trial license, and after 30 days, Power Pack will continue to work for any two users you choose.

See our installation guide for instructions on installing or upgrading Power Pack, and our release notes for more information on 1.3.

For many months now, we've been hard at work on a new, major release of Review Board: Version 2.5. Finally, we're ready to share the first beta so you can <s>break it</s> play with it!

There's so much in here that I can't cover it all, so I've chosen a few of my favorite additions to talk about.

• Expandable diffs in reviews

  When reading through a reviewer's comments on your code, sometimes it's just not clear what they're commenting on until you open the diff viewer. We've fixed that. Now, simply hover over the diff, and the familiar controls for expanding the diff will appear. You can now see more of the diff without switching pages.

• Replace old file attachments and view their diffs

  File attachments on a review request can now be replaced with a new version of the file. You won't have to delete the old ones anymore.

  We also keep a history of each revision of the file, and allow you to see a diff between them. This works for both text files and images.

• Image diffs for file attachments

  As I just pointed out, you can now view diffs between images uploaded to a review request. We have multiple ways available to see what changed in an image. Very handy for new artwork for a product.

• Improved Review Dialog

  The Review Dialog is now instant-apply, meaning that when you make changes to a comment, you don't have to click Save to send those changes to the server. This is a life-saver when you're working on a large review and your computer crashes.

  It also now shows you how your Markdown text will look, so it's not a surprise when you publish your review.

• Better bug tracker integration

  If you use JIRA, GitHub, or modern versions of Bugzilla for your bug tracking, we'll now show you the bug summary, status, and description when hovering over the bug number. You may need to reconfigure your repositories to enable this.

  This is the beginning of some deeper integration we have planned for bug tracking. Future releases will expand on this even further.

• Webhooks

  Administrators can set up webhooks to notify other services when something interesting happens on Review Board. This currently includes publishing, closing, or reopening review requests, publishing reviews, and replying to reviews.

  Webhooks can be tied to review requests on specific repositories, or they can cover all repositories, or cover review requests not associated with repositories.

  A webhook will send a JSON payload similar to that of an API respons. If you have a service you're integrating with, and need a specific format for the payload, you can use a built-in templating language to structure your payload however you like.

• API Tokens

  Scripts or services that talk to Review Board no longer need your username and password to use the API. Instead, you can now create multiple API tokens for this purpose. API tokens are a secure way of authenticating with the web API without needing your credentials, and they can be revoked at any time.

  Scripts or services using API tokens can also be restricted to performing specific operations on specific parts of the API, letting you keep things nice and secure.

• Performance improvements for RBTools and the web UI

  Our API now allows clients to request only the data they need when making API calls. The result is that both RBTools (0.7 and higher) and the web UI are now much more efficient when communicating with Review Board.

• Smaller database sizes

  We've changed how we're storing diffs, and the end result is a substantial reduction in our database storage needs (as much as 80%, from our tests). If you re-run condensediffs, or when viewing older diffs, we'll squash down those older diffs into a much smaller, more tightly-packed version. In the long-run, this means faster upgrades and backups.

There's quite a lot more in this release. Check out the release notes for the complete list of changes in beta 1.

To install this release, run:

$ sudo easy_install \
    -f http://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/ReviewBoard/2.5/ \
    -U ReviewBoard

We don't recommend using this release for production purposes just yet, or against a production database, but please try it out and let us know how it works for you!

It may have only been a week since we released 2.0.14, but we just couldn't wait any longer. We're pretty excited about 2.0.15 for a couple of reasons.

First, many of you have encountered an annoying little bug where the review request counts in the dashboard would be out of sync with reality, occasionally dipping into the negatives. We've finally tracked this down, and can now say it's fixed. All you need to do is upgrade to 2.0.15 and you're set.

Second, we've massively improved searching for review requests. We've overhauled the look, usability, performance, and ordering of the search results. The results now include any matching user accounts (with some handy links) and private review requests (if the searcher's on the access lists for them). Results can be filtered to show only users or review requests.

If you're making use of Local Sites, you'll find search now works there as well. That means search is coming to RBCommons!

Please note that you'll need to do a full rebuild of your search index after upgrading to 2.0.15.

There's a handful of other bug fixes in this release as well.

See the release notes for the full list of changes in 2.0.15.

We've been busy squashing Review Board bugs left and right, all in preparation for Review Board 2.0.14, which is out... now.

There are a bunch of bugs fixed throughout the diff viewer, making the experience of viewing diffs a bit better. We've also fixed some major API caching issues from 2.0.13 that manifested in different ways (so if you're running that release, definitely upgrade).

Review Board 2.0.14 was designed to work with the newly-released RBTools 0.7.2. With their powers combined, you'll have a faster, more reliable experience with many of the RBTools commands, and when coding against the RBTools API.

This release depends on Django 1.6.10, which includes a number of security improvements you probably want. A good reason to upgrade by itself.

There are lots of other fixes and improvements in this release. See the release notes for the full list.

It's been just over a month since RBTools 0.7.1 arrived at stores near you (or probably not). That's a whole month spent not upgrading RBTools, and we can't have that. Plus, there were some good bug fixes and new commands we thought we'd send your way. So let's not waste any more time. Here's what's in today's release of RBTools 0.7.2.

First and foremost, Bitbucket/Beanstalk/Unfuddle fixes. We've heard reports from users that posting changes against their Git repositories hosted on these services that just resulted in failure, so we've gone ahead and fixed that all up.

We've also fixed up some API caching brokenness when running against Review Board 2.0.13 and older. If you've ever tried to land a change clearly marked Ship It!, with an error saying it's not marked Ship It!, then you were hit by this bug.

(Oh, we had to disable some optimizations when running against 2.0.13 and older. You'll probably want to upgrade to the soon-to-be-released Review Board 2.0.14 as soon as you can.)

There are also two new RBTools commands for you to play with:

• rbt login will log into a Review Board server and store the cookie. rbt post and other commands will still do that, but it's sometimes handy to have new users log in once in order to ensure they're all set up properly.
• rbt logout will log you out of your API session on Review Board, and delete the cookie.

For the full list of changes, see our release notes.

Power Pack 1.2 has been released with brand new support for Microsoft Team
Foundation Server and an all-new flexible licensing scheme.

As a bonus, we're also now offering 2 free licensed seats of Power Pack to
every Review Board server! See below for more information.

Microsoft Team Foundation Server

This release introduces support for reviewing code stored on
Microsoft Team Foundation Server
repositories. Team Foundation Server, or TFS, provides source code management,
project management, automated builds, and more, and is deeply integrated with
Microsoft Visual Studio.

With Power Pack, you can now configure all your TFS repositories quickly and
easily, without any of the custom scripts, patches, or workarounds that were
once needed. It's fully supported by the makers of Review Board.

Using RBTools 0.7.1 or higher,
developers can post or update changes against configured TFS repositories with
one command, without having to manually generate or convert diffs. Developers
can also view commits in the Review Board web UI and post any existing commits
for review with one click.

Note that currently, only TFVC repositories are supported. Git repositories
stored on TFS will be supported in a future update.

Flexible Licensing

In prior releases of Power Pack, a license had to be purchased for the entire
server. In larger companies, this made it difficult to justify Power Pack
licenses when needed only by select teams.

We've made our licensing model much more flexible. A license can now be
purchased containing a fixed number of seats, and those seats can be assigned
in a number of ways:

• Manually assigned to specific users.
• Manually assigned to all users in one or more review group.
• Automatically assigned to users in one or more review groups whenever they join the group.
• Automatically assigned to all users on a server when they join.

It's easier and more affordable than ever to get started with Power Pack.
Download a 30 day trial or
purchase a license for your team today!

Two Free Seats Forever!

Starting with Power Pack 1.2.0, all Review Board servers will be eligible to
receive two free, fully-licensed seats of Power Pack when downloading a
30 day trial license.

Once the 30 days are up, your license will convert to a full license for up to
2 people. This license will never expire, and supports all future releases of
Power Pack.

Simply purchase a license at any
time to bring the rest of your team or organization on board.

Today's release of Review Board 2.0.13 has a nice mix of bug fixes and features/improvements for Subversion users and administrators.

Let's get to the features first.

• Subversion users with non-standard repository layouts will now find that they can now browse commits from any top-level directory in their repository in the New Review Request page. Previously, they were kind of stuck if they didn't have the standard trunk/branches scheme.

• We've enhanced the administration UI to enable filtering/searching repositories (which is particularly useful if you have hundreds of repositories in your install). You can also search for any user and edit their profile information.

• Also, we have a new authentication backend. If you're maintaining HTTP Digest password files for other services, and want those same accounts to work with Review Board, you're in luck! Simply enable the new HTTP Digest backend, point to your password file, and you're good to go.

If you're running RBTools 0.7.1 or higher, you'll be able to take advantage of enhanced caching support in our API, making everything just a bit faster!

We also have a number of bug fixes throughout the product. This covers crashes, visual issues, diff interaction/selection/parsing bugs, and more.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

Today's release of RBTools 0.7.1 fixes up several issues found in this month's big 0.7 release, and helps to increase performance when posting changes for review. There are also compatibility fixes for Windows, and improvements to the new Windows installer.

Some of the highlights include:

• Unicode compatibility fixes when running on Windows.
• CVS/Subversion diffs are once again generated from the current directory and not the root of the checkout.
• Several fixes for the Windows Installer.
• Support for invoking RBTools in a Bash shell on Windows.
• Fewer API requests are needed to post changes for review.
• The API caching layer now depends on the upcoming Review Board 2.0.13.

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

RBTools 0.7 is packed with new tools and improvements for your workflow, making it faster to install, post changes to Review Board, and land your changes.

There's a lot here, so we'll go into the major new additions.

Easy installation for Windows and MacOS X

We've improved the installation experience. If you're on Windows or MacOS X, you can simply download the RBTools installer for your platform. In seconds, you'll be ready to use the latest RBTools.

Land reviewed changes with one command

The all-new rbt land is the fastest way to take a change (in a local branch or a review request), validate that it's been reviewed, and land it in your repository. It will format the commit message to include the review request's description and testing information, and can even handle pushing the change upstream and deleting the local branch in one go.

(This is currently only available for Git repositories. Support for other repositories will come soon.)

Exclude files from review

Sometimes you'll have modified files that you just don't want up for review. Auto-generated code, for instance. You can now exclude these when posting changes for review by using the new -X option to rbt post, or by setting EXCLUDE_PATTERNS in .reviewboardrc.

Make your own commands with aliases

Ever find yourself repeating a group of options? rbt post -g yes -u HEAD, for instance? In 0.7, you can create an alias -- a new RBTools command, basically -- for those options.

You can even go a step further and make an alias that runs non-RBTools commands. Want to always run unit tests before posting code? Make an alias. How about merging the latest upstream changes into your branch before posting? There's another alias!

See the documentation on aliases for more information.

Faster communication with Review Board

We've sped up RBTools by caching results from your Review Board server. This means lots of operations, such as posting changes, is faster than ever.

If you're using the RBTools Python API to write your own integrations, you'll benefit from this with no additional work on your end.

Supports Team Foundation Server

RBTools now supports posting changes against Microsoft Team Foundation Server. No more hacking together Subversion or Git wrappers for your repository.

This requires the upcoming release of Power Pack for Review Board. If you're interested in beta-testing Team Foundation Server support, let us know.

And lots more!

We haven't even talked about rbt stamp, support for API tokens, or all the bug fixes and other feature improvements.

Check out the release notes for the whole list of changes.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Tonight's release of Review Board 2.0.12 brings about a large number of improvements to stability, performance, Markdown editing and rendering, e-mail control, repository compatibility, extension support, and more. It's one of our largest 2.0 releases yet.

Better Markdown support

We've completely overhauled our Markdown support. You can now disable Markdown when editing a field or a comment, which is useful when pasting or typing text that may not be Markdown-safe. All plain text fields will still be escaped for edit when you begin editing a field, so that you can easily add Markdown content.

We're smarter about how we escape content for Markdown now as well. You'll see fewer backslashes in your text.

If you prefer to edit all your fields in plain text by default, you can now do so by going into My Account -> Settings and unchecking "Always use Markdown for text fields." Any text fields saved as Markdown will still be loaded as Markdown, but now it'll be your choice.

Oh, and if you want to quickly spell check your text fields, just toggle Markdown off for a bit, and you'll get the browser's native spell checking back. You can then toggle Markdown back on when you're done.

The Markdown fields were a bit slow before, especially if the browser was bogged down. We've fixed this, and you should now have a much more comfortable typing experience.

Last, but not least, Markdown rendering is massively improved. We now preserve whitespace, blank lines, wrapping in lists, line breaks in lists, and the starting line numbers for lists. We have smarter language-based syntax highlighting (when using GitHub-style fenced code blocks), and we don't show unwanted backslashes in rendered text.

Better stability

We've fixed over 30 bugs, including issues with multi-threaded server setups, text selection in the diff viewer, CVS keyword processing, Unicode encoding issues with some copy/pasted text in text fields, auto-complete usability, and much more.

A broken extension is now less likely to break Review Board. Much of the custom code in extensions are sandboxed, preventing their errors from breaking anything else.

Support for Kiln and FogBugz

Are you a Kiln or FogBugz user? Good news! You can now review your code on Kiln with Review Board and link to your bugs on FogBugz.

Lots more

This post is already getting pretty long, so check out the release notes for the full list of changes in 2.0.12.