What's New in Review Board

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.

This month's release of Power Pack 1.1.0 with Reports was very well received, though not immune to problems. As some users reported, we inadvertently broke compatibility with Review Board 1.7.x.

Today's release of Power Pack 1.1.1 fixes this compatibility issue.

We'll be announcing some brand new features and licensing improvements in the coming months for all new and existing Power Pack customers.

Today's release of RBTools 0.6.3 fixes a handful of annoying little bugs across Git, Mercurial, Subversion, Perforce, and ClearCase. If you use any one of these (and there's a good chance you do), it's time to upgrade!

In past releases, failed post operations could leave behind incomplete review requests, which wasn't always obvious. RBTools will now print out the review request after a failure, making it easier to fix things up without creating a new review request.

We've also fixed a bug in the Python API for Review Board that resulted in errors when performing HTTP DELETE operations.

See the release notes for the complete list of fixes.

While this is a fairly small and bug-oriented release, we're happy to announce that RBTools 0.7 is coming soon, with several new features and native installers for Windows and MacOS X! If you're reading this in your browser, please subscribe to our mailing list for announcements!

We've just released a new build of Power Pack, our premium set of features for Review Board. Power Pack includes support for GitHub Enterprise, PDF review, and more.

Power Pack 1.1 adds a major new feature: Reports.

Teams of all sizes can benefit from analyzing and measuring the effectiveness of code review amongst their developers. Better insight leads to better, more cost-effective processes and policies. To help with this, we're adding five different ways of looking at your code review process:

• Time to First Feedback

  This helpful graph shows how long, on average, it takes for new changes to be reviewed. See where the bottlenecks are in your team.

• Time to Close

  Some code reviews hang on for far too long, delaying releases. See how often this is happening, and where.

• Review Request Statistics

  A quick at-a-glance table showing statistics on how frequently team members post review requests, how many issues they typically have filed against them, and how many of those are dropped instead of fixed.

• Code Review Statistics

  More detailed metrics on the actual code reviews performed within the team. See who on your team are more actively reviewing code, how many issues they tend to find, and how frequently they mark Ship It! You'll have a better sense of who is really engaged in the code review process.

• Code Review Relationships

  This eye-catching diagram shows who's more actively reviewing who's code. It provides a great way of quickly seeing which parts of your team are working closely together, and who's not pulling their weight.

See the release notes for more information.

To install or upgrade Power Pack, simply run:

sudo easy_install -U ReviewBoardPowerPack

To get a trial or purchase a license, see the Power Pack page.

Another week, another release for you!

Last week's release of 2.0.10, while otherwise fantastic, didn't play so nicely with certain MySQL configurations. This resulted in some people hitting errors during site upgrade. 2.0.11 addresses this issue, and brings a couple other improvements to the table.

Perforce users may notice that the "Change" field on a review request will now reflect the submitted change number, instead of the original (now useless) change number, once the change goes into Perforce.

We also fixed a crash for users in timezones not local to this planet. Unknown timezones will simply default to the server time.

See the release notes for all the details.

We have another release for you this week! After a couple productive days of bug fixing and performance tuning, we're ready to bring you Review Board 2.0.10.

This release fixes a couple bugs in the new features from 2.0.9, as well as numerous other bugs that have been reported over the past month. If you're running 2.0.9, we strongly recommend upgrading.

We massively improved the load times for dashboards using the People, Groups, or To Me columns. We've also tweaked the Search box to search summaries a lot faster.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

We have a big release today, full of bug fixes, performance improvements, usability improvements, and a couple new features.

We fine-tuned the Markdown-capable text fields, helping them to feel more smooth and natural when typing. This is especially noticeable with lots of text, or for those of you who type really fast.

We also sped up the API, making many operations a lot faster, especially querying for review requests. This will benefit RBTools, the UI, and most third-party applications.

Ever want to copy text from a single column in the diff viewer? Now you can! Just select the text and hit Copy as usual. No more unwanted lines or line numbers messing up your pretty code.

Hate getting e-mails about actions you just performed? You can now turn this off in your My Account page.

Extension writers and API consumers, we've given you some new abilities that should help you better script your custom integrations. Remember to show off what you've written in the Package Store!

There are also nearly 20 bug fixes, including fixes for auto-completing users and groups, Markdown rendering and text escaping, incorrect open issue counts in the dashboard, crashes and rendering issues in the diff viewer when viewing some interdiffs, and much more.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

Review Board 2.0.8 fixes numerous bugs around the product, ranging from installation and upgrade woes to usability improvements to repository and patch compatibility fixes.

Just over a week ago, a new version of Python-Markdown was released that broke Review Board on Python 2.6. If you've installed Review Board or upgraded recently, and saw errors mentioning "importlib," you were bit by this. Upgrading to Review Board 2.0.8 will pull down a compatible version of Python-Markdown, fixing this problem.

We've also fixed some breakages in the New Review Request page with commits or patches containing certain types of Unicode characters, as well as Subversion commits that didn't contain a commit message.

Setting up a Bitbucket repository is now a bit easier. Errors are properly reported in more cases, and anything provided during configuration is now validated better.

There are several other changes as well. The full details are in the release notes.