What's New in Review Board

We’ve been working hard on fixing the bugs found by our beta testers, fine-tuning all the new extension support, and getting a few more experimental Web Hooks in place for more hosting services.

All around, it’s a good release. In fact, we were looking to call this the final 2.0, but we have a few fixes we want just a bit more testing on first.

Some of the key highlights of this release include:

• Fixes for upgrading from a pre-1.7 release
• Better protection from broken extensions
• Some new extension abilities for blocking publishing of review requests
• Condensing diffs no longer eats all available memory
• Lots of bugs squashed

The release notes have the full details, as well as installation instructions.

Our hope is to release the final 2.0 this month. A big thanks to all of our beta testers for providing such great feedback!

The Django project just announced a new set of security releases. We're putting out a matching Review Board 1.7.25 release that pulls these in, plus fixes for Active Directory and some documentation.

We recommend that everybody running 1.7.x updates to 1.7.25. If you're not ready to upgrade Review Board yet, you can instead upgrade to the new Django release by running:

$ sudo easy_install Django==1.4.11

If you're running the Review Board 2.0 RCs, you can instead upgrade Django by running:

$ sudo easy_install Django==1.6.3

The final Review Board 2.0 release will include these fixes.

See the release notes for the complete list of fixes.

Review Board 1.7.24 is out!

What? Another release already? Yes, unfortunately a couple problems were found in last night's 1.7.23 release, and we wanted to get the fixes out to you ASAP.

This fixes a crash with adding new repositories, and with displaying the Manual Updates page (triggered when Review Board detects a problem that must be fixed by hand).

The very brief release notes are available.

Review Board 1.7.23 is out. It’s a fairly typical bug fix release, with one addition that helps to address Heartbleed.

Heartbleed is the name for a widespread SSL security vulnerability found in OpenSSL and announced to the world on April 7th that can allow attackers to, in some cases, access private data in memory. It’s not specific to Review Board (and, in fact, the vulnerability lies outside of Review Board). Most Linux distributions are now providing patched OpenSSL packages, and the general recommendation is to re-issue your SSL certificates.

GitHub is recommending that users change their passwords and reset their authorization tokens. Review Board uses these tokens to communicate with your repositories on GitHub.

In 1.7.23, we’re providing a new management command for resetting your associated GitHub authorization tokens. You’ll need to know the password (and two-factor auth token, if enabled) for each linked account that you want to update.

To reset your tokens, install 1.7.23 and run:

$ rb-site manage /path/to/site reset-github-tokens

If you’re running an installation accessible over the Internet, you may want to have your users reset their passwords as well, to be safe.

Along with this, we have some authorization fixes for GitLab, and a few small bug fixes.

See the release notes for more information.

Oh man, do we have a great release for you today.

RBTools 0.6 has just been released, and it's a big one. We spent a lot of time simplifying the process for posting and updating review requests, and we think it's going to make life a lot easier for just about everyone.

Posting using Git or Mercurial used to require dealing with --parent and --revision-range, along with our custom revision syntax. Now all you have to do is pass native revisions or revision ranges to rbt post, like so:

$ rbt post HEAD
$ rbt post main-branch..feature-branch
$ rbt post 123:126

Compare this to the old way of doing things:

$ rbt post --parent=HEAD^
$ rbt post --revision-range=main-branch:feature-branch
$ rbt post --revision-range=123:126

We've also improved how "guessing" descriptions and summaries from commits work. In previous versions, you needed to run rbt post -g to enable guessing, but in 0.6, it's now automatic for new review requests. This means less typing and less work to do.

That behavior can also be changed through new GUESS_FIELDS settings in .reviewboardrc. This is covered more in the documentation.

A few other goodies:

• Feature and performance improvements for Mercurial
• Shelf support for Perforce
• Git repository hook scripts for auto-closing review requests and requiring approval for pushes
• Support for Markdown commit descriptions in Review Board 2.0
• Recording commit IDs in Review Board 2.0
• Many new configuration options

And more.

A couple important notes. We've removed support for the old post-review tool. Running post-review will now tell you to use rbt post instead.

We've also removed support for Python 2.4. You will now need 2.5 or higher. We strongly recommend that everybody upgrades to Python 2.7.

See the release notes for the complete list of changes.

Review Board 2.0 RC 2 is out, everybody! Thanks to all the great feedback from our beta testers, we were able to identify and fix the few remaining issues keeping us from a solid 2.0 release.

There's a bunch of fixes for little things here and there. Some polish, some performance enhancements, and a couple usability improvements. All in all, the release is feeling pretty stable, and we're feeling confident that the final 2.0 is just around the corner.

We also included a couple experimental feature additions from this semester's batch of students:

• The dashboard widgets in the administration UI can now be reordered through drag-and-drop, allowing you to see the widgets that are most important to you at a glance.
• We've added an experimental WebHook for those using GitHub. This hook will close any review requests referenced in a pushed commit, filling in the revision and branch where the commit landed. This requires a publicly-accessible Review Board install.

Along with this, we've made some nice improvements to rb-site. It has a new streamlined installation experience, as well as new management commands for working with installed extensions.

There's a few other goodies we've thrown in as well. See our release notes for all the details.

We're in the home stretch now with our release of Review Board 2.0 RC 1.

Our fist release candidate was focused on squashing bugs, improving performance, and tweaking the
usability of the product, in preparation for the final 2.0 release.

We've fine-tuned the diff viewer, cutting the time of some operations in half. We've also reduced
the startup and response time for installations using extensions.

36 bugs were fixed since beta 3. These cover site installation, administration, the diff viewer,
the new My Account page, and much more.

For extension writers, we've added a new hook for custom authentication backends, as well as a few more
goodies to help keep your extension code tight and clean.

This release also includes the security fixes in the
1.7.22 release,
and strengthens security and access logs in other areas.

If you're planning on upgrading to Review Board 2.0 when it's out, this would be a great time to test.
We're hoping to release it soon, and your feedback will go a long way to ensuring this release is solid.

The full details are in the release notes.

Review Board 1.7.22 is out. It's primarily a bug fix release, with an important security update (particularly for public installations).

An XSS vulnerability was reported that we've patched that involves the Search field. If you're running a 1.7.x release, we recommend updating to 1.7.22.

There's also a large number of bug fixes in this release. We've been working hard on going through the bug tracker and fixing up as many bugs as we can. This includes Git diff parsing fixes, compatibility improvements for Mercurial configurations, easier support for enabling HTTPS, and more.

See the release notes for the complete list of fixes.

We thought it was long past time to show off some of the excellent work our UCOSP Fall 2013 students have been doing, and introduce you all to our Open Academy Spring 2014 students.

UCOSP Fall 2013

In Fall of 2013, we had a batch of great students from across Canada: Elaine, Natasha, Edward, Behzad, and Alissa. We met up at Mozilla in Toronto and got everyone set up. From there, they flew through the semester, adding some great improvements to Review Board.

• Elaine wrote an extension for effectively using checklists for code review.

• Natasha put together an experimental project for auto-suggesting reviewers on new review requests based on the files that were modified, in order to target those people who may know the code best. We're hoping to optimize this (some database changes may be needed on our end) and get it into a future release.

• Edward rewrote our search support for 2.0 to use Haystack, which is a lot easier to set up than PyLucene.

  He also improved RBTools by adding rbt setup-repo, adding the --commit option to rbt patch, and adding the --update option to rbt post. These are all part of the latest RBTools releases.

• Behzad did a bunch of work to get our new trophy system in place. We still have some work to do to integrate it, which we're hoping to do after 2.0, but the end result will allow for new types of trophies, a trophy case to see which trophies you've collected, and extension support.

• Alissa added a new page in the Administration UI for doing a security screening of the site. It can help highlight known configuration issues on the server that need to be addressed to keep things secure. This is going into 2.0.

We put a little demo video together with our Winter team showing off all their work. Check it out!

It was a fantastic team, and we're very thankful for all the great work they've done!

Open Academy Spring 2014

We participated in Open Academy this year for the second time, and were once again privileged to have another fantastic group of students, spanning schools across the globe. This semester, we have Anselina, Bhushan, Edwin, Iines, Joonas, Mirai, Olessia, Stephanie, Tami, and Tomi working with us.

We met up at Facebook HQ in February for a fun and intense weekend of hacking. There, we got to know each other, ate some donuts, figured out projects for the semester, went bowling, and got to hacking.

(Here are some more photos of the event, taken by Tami herself!)

They're all well into their projects at this point. There's a lot of great stuff coming:

• Anselina and Bhushan are working to add official support for pre-commit and post-commit hooks for Git, Mercurial, Subversion, GitHub, and other services.

  These will be able to close out review requests when the commits are pushed, and enforce approval before pushing changes.

• Edwin is making the contextual diff fragments in reviews a bit nicer by allowing you to expand them to get a better idea of where the comments were made without having to jump into the diff viewer.

• Iines is working on making it easier to link to specific lines in the diff viewer.

• Joonas and Mirai are performing some usability research and development on improving our mobile experience.

• Olessia is expanding our support for hosting services. She's adding Review Board 2.0's post-commit support for more hosting services, and providing a lot of the base work needed to revamp the repository configuration experience.

• Stephanie is making the widgets in the Administration UI reorderable, and allowing admins to add and remove widgets. She'll also be adding extension support for custom admin widgets!

• Tami is improving the user page to be more flexible. It will be updated to let you see all the reviews made by that user.

• Tomi is adding deeper support for bug trackers. With this work, it'll be possible to update bug reports when the status of review requests change, and to show information on a bug when mousing over a bug number.

They've been making great progress so far! They also all have work going into Review Board 2.0 or RBTools 0.6. Not a bad start!

Here's a few of our students to tell you about their experience at the sprint at Facebook:

Here's to another exciting semester!

Review Board 2.0 beta 3 is out! This is an amazing release, with over 15 new user-facing features, over 40 bug fixes, nearly 20 new API and
extension improvements, and some significant performance and usability enhancements.

This is a huge beta, but it's also expected to be our last beta. We'll be moving on to RC next, with a final 2.0 release (hopefully) around the corner. If you're planning to upgrade to Review Board 2.0 (and why wouldn't you?), you should give the beta try.

Some of the highlights of this release include:

• Issue tracking in the dashboard

  See at a glance which changes are ready to ship and which still have work left to do.

  You'll never see a Ship It! if there are any issues still open.

• Better review request updates

  Changes to the Description and Testing Done fields are shown as diffs, making it easy to see what changed.

  New diff uploads list the modified files and the complexity of the changes.

  New file attachments are shown as thumbnails, and can be reviewed right from the box.

• Indentation markers in diffs

  Your indentation changes are now shown clearly without distracting from your other changes. Unlike most diff viewers, we don't clutter your view with inserts, deletes, or replaces.

  Super useful for Python files.

• All new My Account page

  It's now easier to find and join groups!

  This is also a great place for extensions to provide per-user customization.

• Customizable "approval" for review requests

  Extensions can decide if a review request is approved, and API consumers (such as pre-commit hooks) can enforce those decisions.

  We're working on some hooks that can take advantage of this.

• Improved post-commit support for Subversion

  Non-standard repository layouts now work a lot better with the New Review Request page.

And much, much more.

If you're an extension author, you'll have a lot of new goodies to play with. An assortment of new hooks, better static media support, per-page JavaScript extensions, and easier extension initialization, to name a few.

Be sure to check out our release notes for the full list of changes, including some pretty screenshots showing off many of the new features. Be sure to read the installation instructions and upgrade notes.