Django just released a couple of new security updates, and we wanted to get them into your hands as fast as possible.
We've released Review Board 1.6.16. This uses the new Django 1.3.7 as the minimum required version. We have also backported several bug fixes from the Review Board 1.7 releases, which should particularly help with those of you who have had any crashes in the diff viewer. Well worth upgrading to.
See the release notes for the full list of changes.
Review Board 1.7.5 is out. It fixes a few, mostly small problems people have hit, and a major compatibility change with the newly released django-pipeline 1.3.
If you installed 1.7.4 in the past week, you may have had a crash when accessing most pages, possibly saying "CompilerError." This was due to some compatibility changes in django-pipeline 1.3 that we still need to investigate. However, that release also dropped Python 2.5 support, which means we'll be requiring 1.2.24 from here on out. My apologies to any packagers that this affects.
See the release notes for the full list of changes.
This week's release of Review Board 1.7.3, while otherwise awesome, had some regressions for users of Internet Explorer, old versions of Firefox, and some Windows users generating diffs.
1.7.4 fixes these issues. If you're using 1.7.3 at all, you should certainly upgrade. It's a small release, but an important one.
Release notes are available.
Another great release tonight! RBTools 0.4.3 is out, and fixes a handful of bugs and introduces some new features.
This release works with the new Review Board 1.7.3 release to better show moved files in diffs when using Perforce. It also adds the beginnings of Bazaar support. Along with that, many bug fixes to common and not-so-common problems people have hit.
This is probably the last big release in the 0.4.x series. Very soon, we will be releasing 0.5, which puts us on the path to the elusive 1.0. The 0.5 release introduces the beginnings of the Python API for working with Review Board, and a handful of useful command line tools for working with Review Board. This will in time replace post-review, though that will stay around in the 0.5.x releases as people migrate over to the new commands.
See the release notes for more information.
Review Board 1.7.3 is released! This is mostly a bug-fix release, with a new feature for optionally e-mailing when review requests are closed, and some compatibility improvements.
Several of the bug fixes in this release were fixed by our new batch of students joining us from UCOSP this semester. Congrats on your first shipped code in Review Board!
For the full list of changes, see the release notes.
Review Board 1.7.2 is out, with a number of fixes to commonly encountered problems found in 1.7.x, and a few new features.
Some users of 1.7 and 1.7.1 encountered some confusing problems when attempting to upgrade from an older release, due to some of the upgrade instructions not always showing up, and due to confusing errors when trying to upgrade using the now unsupported Python 2.4. This release should make the process much more clear.
There's also a good number of fixes for various other bugs throughout the product.
On top of this, three new features!
See the release notes for more information.
There were a few headaches some of our users hit when upgrading to Review Board 1.7. Various edge cases we didn't see during testing, and we feel terrible about that. However, thanks to some great debugging and excellent feedback on our mailing list, we've been able to identify and fix some of these problems.
Review Board 1.7.1 is mostly a bug fix release that takes care of the following problems:
There is, however, a new feature from one of this winter's UCOSP students, Karl Leuschen, which introduces a checkbox when configuring a GitHub repository that automatically associates the configured SSH key with the repository, simplifying setup. We plan to bring this feature to other hosting services later.
Full release notes are available.
The wait is over! Our latest and greatest Review Board 1.7 is out and ready! This was a massive release, and is the first big step in taking Review Board in a new and exciting direction.
Lookin' good!
Review Board 1.7 offers a revamped look and feel and a variety of new features designed to improve the workflow for both users and administrators. There's improved issue tracking, better support for file attachments, moved file support in the diff viewer, extensions, a brand new administration UI, per-user timezone support, and more.
Better issue tracking
In 1.6, we introduced issue tracking. When writing a new comment, you could indicate that you have an issue that must be addressed before the change goes into the product. This was a huge improvement for many developers, as it gave them a bit of a to-do list.
In 1.7, we've improved issue tracking by actually showing a to-do list of all opened issues right on the review request. You can quickly look through what needs to be done, jump down to the discussion and comment, and jump back. The list of issues can be filtered by state or by reviewer. Never miss another filed issue in a flood of reviews.
Extensions
Starting in this release, we're greatly expanding what people will be able to do with Review Board. We've introduced two new concepts that, while young, we expect will become quite popular over time: Extension support, and pluggable review UIs.
Third parties wil be able to write new features and customizations that can be plugged into any standard Review Board install. These can add new fields to a review request, or dashboard views. New API. Content to any page. Administration dashboard widgets. They can perform actions when review requests are posted, or automate tasks in the database.
Extensions can also provide new review UIs for different types of files. Now, it's possible to write support for display the content of specific types of file, commenting on them, and displaying those comments in a review. It's not just about code anymore.
Over time, we'll provide official extensions, and an easier way to download and install them directly into your own Review Board.
New administration UI
The administration UI got a bit of a revamp. When you next log in, you'll see a dashboard of widgets showing statistics on your server, graphing activity, and showing a quick glance of your important settings.
A new top-level Extensions page was added that will show you what extensions are available on your system, and which are enabled. Through here, you can manage your extensions, configure them, and even inspect their database contents.
We've made improvements all throughout, and will be continuing to improve on it in the 1.7.x releases, and through new extensions.
A note about Windows
Starting in this release, we're dropping official support for running Review Board on a Windows server. We've found that many of our users who tried to install on Windows ended up with a frustrating install experience due to conflicting versions of Python and other modules in ways that just simply doesn't happen on other platforms.
The 1.6.x releases will continue to be supported on Windows, and technically, 1.7 should work as well. We just won't be offering support anymore for Windows-specific problems.
If you're running on Windows, we highly recommend installing Review Board on a Linux VM and running that in a product like VMware Workstation or ESXi/vSphere.
And Python 2.4
We've also dropped support for Python 2.4. If you need to upgrade, your best bet is to install on a modern Linux distribution, as compiling it yourself may be a bit of a headache. We recommend upgrading to something with Python 2.7, which will be supported long-term.
Other shiny things
You can see a breakdown of everything that's new in our release notes. And check out the rest of the screenshots to see our new features and style in action.
Review Board 1.6.15 is out the door. It's a small bug fix release on top of 1.6.14, with a handful of fixes to annoyances we and others have noticed. The highlights are:
Full release notes are available.
Stay tuned tomorrow for another release announcement... :)
Today I'm happy to announce the release of Review Board 1.7 RC 1, the last milestone (hopefully) before the final 1.7 release.
We had hoped to get this out the door a bit earlier, but decided to smooth over some rough edges to give people a better upgrade experience, and it was worth it.
1.7 RC fixes a large number of bugs, both those found in 1.7 beta 2 and those we've had in Review Board for some time. The UI should feel faster, smoother, with fewer jumpy editors and nice usability tweaks here and there.
Along with the bug fixes, we've laid the foundation for pluggable review UIs for different types of file attachments, introduced a couple new file attachment thumbnail renderers, and fully replaced screenshot review with image file attachment review.
Some major bugs with extensions have been fixed. In particular, the list of extensions and their configuration is now properly synchronized across all your web server threads/processes, and all URLs provided by extensions will no longer "randomly" fail to work.
The next big step before 1.7 is getting all our documentation done. We expect code changes to be at a minimum. The exceptions will be some UI polish and any major bugs that turn up in RC.
If you're looking to upgrade to 1.7 soon, we suggest giving 1.7 RC a try, as it'll more or less be what we'll ship for 1.7.
Full release notes are available.
