What's New in Review Board

We have a pair of releases today for users of Review Board 1.6.x and 1.7.x. Both contain important security updates, and we recommend updating immediately.

This security vulnerability allows attackers to execute JavaScript under certain conditions. There are no known vulnerabilities in the wild. The latest 1.6.x and 1.7.x releases are susceptible to the flaw. We have released 1.6.x and 1.7.x updates. We recommend that all users upgrade their install to a modern release, particularly if you are running a version prior to 1.6.

Along with the security updates, Review Board 1.7.10 provides some new bug fixes, API enhancements (for comments and screenshots), and UI refinement.

See the 1.6.17 and 1.7.10 releases for more info.

Some of our wonderful early adopters found a couple bugs in 1.7.8 and some missing API for the new Depends On feature. We decided to get these out before everyone else upgraded.

Thanks early adopters!

Review Board 1.7.9 has an installation fix for some MySQL configurations, new API for Depends On and Blocks fields on review requests, and fixes to the recommended cgit URL for Git repositories.

Release notes are available.

Review Board 1.7.8 is out, and it's chock full of goodies.

Review requests have two new fields: Blocks and Depends On. Developers can mark that a review request depends on another review request, helping reviewers prioritize what to review first. This goes both ways. A review request depending on another will be shown as being blocked on the other.

We've increased performance across the board. Every page's load times should be reduced. Upload times for diffs will, in many cases, also be reduced, as we won't hammer your repository as hard. This will also help with those using GitHub who may worry about API limits. The dashboard's reloading is smoother and less prone to problems when the connection or server goes down.

Clicking "Get Support" now goes to an all-new support page with some helpful links. If you have a support contract with us, the support page will give you an easy way to contact us with a problem.

You can even change the page that "Get Support" points to, which is handy if you have your own support page in your company.

That's not all. There's several improvements to the extension framework, improved logging for error resolution, and several bug fixes.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

RBTools 0.5.1 is out, with many important bug fixes, some new features, and improvements to our API.

We've addressed the bulk of the problems people hit with the new commands in RBTools 0.5.0. In particular, several crashes with Perforce, Subversion and Bazaar have been addressed.

Most of the RBTools commands now have a --repository-type option, which can be used to specify the type of repository, instead of RBTools having to guess. This can also be set in .reviewboardrc by setting the REPOSITORY_TYPE setting. Setting this will dramatically speed up creating and updating review requests, and prevent problems with nested repositories.

You can use post-review --list-repo-types or rbt list-repo-types to see the valid values for this new setting.

To upgrade your copy of RBTools, just run:

easy_install -U RBTools

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

We've been working toward a set of enhancements to Review Board for larger installations that we're currently calling Review Board Enterprise. The functionality we're targeting initially includes:

• Support for repositories on GitHub Enterprise.
• Ability to scale across multiple servers, to handle larger numbers of consecutive users.
• Faster diff viewer rendering. Diffs will begin generating immediately upon upload, outside the Apache process, and this can be scaled out as well.
• Pre-built Review Board VMs for quick installation and scale-out.

Depending on interest, future versions may include:

• Enhanced diff features. Due to the new way we can process diffs, we can start enhancing what the users see, speeding up their review process, and thus saving companies time and money.
• Multiple SSH keys. Associate different SSH keys to different repositories.
• Single sign-on. Integrate with existing SAML-based services.

These are changes we've been using on our hosting service, RBCommons, and are working to make available to a larger audience.

We're collecting sign-ups from anyone interested in giving this a try. We'll send out an announcement with a beta download once it's ready.

If you're interested, you can sign up here.

This will be a for-pay addition to Review Board, and will help directly fund the continued development of Review Board itself.

We're proud to announce that we've released an initial version of the PDF Review extension. This extension allows viewing PDF attachments directly in your browser, and you can add comments on the content.

If you're curious about how this works, we have an overview of the functionality over on our blog. If you'd like to get access to the beta, please fill out the signup form and we'll be in touch.

1.7.7 introduced a crash during new site installations for some users. We apologize for anyone who hit this. The new release, 1.7.7.1, should take care of this and get you back on track!

Release notes are available.

Review Board 1.7.7 is out. It has a couple new features for admins, a series of bug fixes, and some worthwhile performance improvements that you shouldn't miss.

We did some profiling and found a couple common cases we were able to speed up considerably. The Dashboard and All Review Requests pages should be faster, as should any changes involving parent diffs.

There's also some additions in here that set things up for the upcoming PDF review extension. If you're interested in giving that a try, sign up for the beta..

Release notes are available.

Review Board has been a fantastic tool for software developers for many years now, but over time, we've seen people try to use it for reviewing things beyond code. We've therefore been working to make Review Board useful to a wider audience beyond just developers.

Lately, we've been working toward the first part of this, a Review Board extension to enable peer review of PDF documents. We'll be holding a private beta of this extension pretty soon, and are opening up a sign-up form for those who are interested in giving it a try and giving us feedback.

In order to help fund the Review Board project, we plan to make this a paid extension (but free for open source or educational use). In exchange for your comments and feedback, participants in this beta will be offered a discount off the list price once we hit 1.0.

If you'd like to participate, please fill out the signup form and we'll be in touch.

The next major evolution of RBTools has been released!

RBTools 0.5 is a major undertaking that we're sure is going to make a lot of you happy. This release introduces several new scripts for working with review requests from the command line, and a brand new Python API for writing your own scripts and applications.

rbt

The new rbt tool serves as your launching point for any new tools that work with Review Board. It works like git, in that it takes a subcommand and options, which may do anything from post a new diff to query the statuses of your pending review requests. Here are the one we provide now:

• rbt attach - Attaches a file to an existing review request.
• rbt close - Closes a review request (either as submitted or discarded.
• rbt diff - Shows the diff that would be uploaded to a review request. This works like the old post-review --output-diff.
• rbt patch - Takes the diff from a review request and applies it locally to your tree. Useful for open source projects!
• rbt post - Posts or updates a review request. This is your new post-review script.
• rbt status - Displays all your pending review requests for the repository you're running this from.

We plan to add more in time, and to refine many of these. It's still largely considered a beta, but we'd love the feedback!

Now you may have noticed rbt post above. We're deprecating post-review, and plan to remove it sometime before RBTools 1.0. A lot of you probably are pretty used to typing post-review now, so now's a good time to start building new muscle memory!

Otherwise, post-review is pretty unchanged from 0.4.x, so you shouldn't run into any big regressions.

Python API

All of our new scripts make use of a central Python API that we have developed. This was written to make it easy to talk to a Review Board server. It supports our entire web API. We have a whole tutorial and reference guide on the new Python API.

Those of you maintaining your own forks of post-review or your own post-commit hooks or utility scripts should start moving over to the new API, give it a spin. Let us know how it works for you.

We still have a lot to do, but we hope this release is as exciting and useful to all of you as it has been to us.

We had a number of people contribute to this, but in particular I want to thank and congratulate Steven MacLeod on this release. Steven is a former UCOSP and Google Summer of Code student and the new lead developer for RBTools, and has done a fantastic job putting all this together.

Release notes are available, and cover all the new additions and the bug fixes that went into this release.