What's New in Review Board

Hello, world! To those who celebrated Thanksgiving this week, I hope you all had a great one, with delicious food and good company.

Tonight we've released Review Board 1.6.14. This is a large bug fix, performance enhancement, and feature enhancement release, and will probably be the last big 1.6.x release, as we're putting the finishing touches on 1.7.

Some of the highlights include:

• Support for very large files in the diff viewer. We clocked a 44,000 line file at just around 3 seconds, instead of several minutes in 1.6.13.
• Further improving loading times for review requests.
• API support for creating, modifying and deleting review groups and managing their user lists.
• More helpful text when configuring a repository path.
• Many bug fixes and minor improvements.

Full release notes are available.

As I said above, we're very close to the final 1.7 release now. We'll have a release candidate out any day, and barring any major problems, expect to have a final release within the next two weeks.

For over a year now, we've provided professional Review Board hosting for businesses at RBCommons. It's been a very good year and change, and we're celebrating by offering an End of the Year sale.

For a limited time, new signups and upgrades on the Small, Medium or Large plans will receive 50% off the price for 3 months.

If you're looking to get started with Review Board and don't feel like hosting it yourself, give us a try. There's never been a better time!

Review Board 1.6.13 is out, and with it comes a bunch of nice little bug fixes.

A couple of the highlights have to do with the new incremental diff expansion feature. There were problems in the diff headers shown in e-mails, and the expansion links for certain function/class headers, which are now fixed in this release.

There's also a number of other fixes for several other bugs across the product.

See the release notes for more information.

We're inching closer to the finish line with Review Board 1.7 beta 2!

The big highlight is a brand new style for Review Board. We've kept the same basic style since we first introduced Review Board, and decided it was time for a change. The new style is slicker, more polished, more consistent, fits better on the screen, and yet is still familiar.

There's also some fixes for problems people have encountered with beta 1, and of course all the fixes and enhancements in the latest 1.6 release.

This will not be the last beta. We are introducing two new pieces of architecture soon that will allow for really awesome things in future releases. The first is support for writing custom review UIs for different file types (the beginnings of which will land in beta 3). The second is a new JavaScript architecture that extension developers will be able to take advantage of to better integrate with Review Board and plug into our browser-side UIs.

Those who are interested in writing extensions should discuss their needs on the reviewboard-dev mailing list. We have a limited number of hook points right now, and need your help to prioritize.

Full release notes are available.

RBTools 0.4.2 is out!

This releaase is full of bug fixes of many kinds, and is worth upgrading to. There are fixes for Git, Subversion, Mercurial, and Clear Case, along with various other compatibility fixes.

We've added improved debug output, so it'll be easier to diagnose problems when they occur.

Full release notes are available.

Update 25-Sep-2012 2:16AM: There was a small regression with the display of function headers on some comments. No crashes or anything, just displaying content wrong. We've re-released 1.6.12 with this fix.

Review Board 1.6.12 has been released, and is full of long-requested goodies.

We have fixed a number of key issues with parsing diffs. In particular, SVN diffs with property changes no longer totally break, and Git diffs no longer have the useful information like the summary and author stripped away.

We also introduced a new feature by popular request: Incremental expansion for diffs. You can now expand 20 lines at a time or up to the listed function or class, instead of expanding an entire collapsed region at once. You can also re-collapse the expansion. NetApp, Inc. sponsored the development of this feature.

There's also many other fixes and improvements in the release.

See the release notes for the full breakdown.

The first beta for the next big Review Board release is out now. We've just released 1.7 beta 1, which brings with it a number of new and exciting features.

First up is our new extension support. For a long time now, we've been developing a branch with support for loadable extensions that can enhance the features of Review Board. This is finally ready to ship in an experimental form. There's basic documentation on writing an extension, and we'll be working on some sample extensions people can install. As I said, the extension support is experimental, and will likely change and improve over time.

Administrators will see a new administration UI in this version, complete with fancy graphs of what's happening on the server. The administration UI now features an enhanced dashboard with widgets full of various bits of information. New widgets can be provided by extensions (though there's not yet a way to customize which widgets are shown).

Reviewers and developers will better be able to track what issues remain with the new issue summary table. This is a filterable list of issues that have been filed, shown on every review request. You can quickly check what's been opened, discarded, or resolved, and jump to the comment in question. We'll be integrating this more tightly into review request updates in the future.

We have better file attachment previews for certain file types. Right now, this includes text files, which will show snippets of text, and image files, which will show thumbnails.

You can look forward to smaller databases from here on out. Previously, every new upload of a diff would create new copies of each per-file diff, even if it didn't change since the last revision, taking up unnecessary space. No longer! We consolidate these now, reducing the amount of space that's needed. This will only apply to new diffs, though.

For those who have users spread across the world, we now localize dates and times. Users can set their timezone in their My Account page and all dates and times will be based on that timezone.

There are many more changes. You can see the full details in the release notes.

Please note, this is a beta, and not intended for production use. We do recommend testing it and making sure it works for you, though, and we are actively dog-fooding it.

Also, note that Python 2.4 is no longer supported. You will need Python 2.5 or higher. We recommend installing 2.6 or 2.7 to ensure the highest compatibility going forward.

Contact our mailing list if you have any problems, or file bugs for any regressions you find.

Yesterday, we released Review Board 1.6.11, which required the new Django 1.3.2 security release. Unfortunately, as some users have noticed, Django 1.3.2 breaks Python 2.4 compatibility. We have filed a bug against Django, but in the meantime, if you're using Python 2.4, you may need to downgrade back to Django 1.3.1.

To downgrade, first locate the Django-1.3.2*.egg directory in your Python path. Delete that, and then install 1.3.1 by doing:

$ sudo easy_install Django==1.3.1

We are hoping this will be addressed soon, at which point we'll update our 1.6.11 package with a hotfix that requires the new version.

Review Board 1.6.11 is out, with some fixes to regressions in 1.6.10 and further optimizations If you're running 1.6.10, you'll want to upgrade.

We also are now requiring Django 1.3.2. This is a security release that the Django project put out yesterday. We recommend that all Review Board 1.6.x users upgrade to this release. If you're not intended to upgrade to 1.6.11 right away, you can upgrade Django by typing:

$ sudo easy_install Django==1.3.2

You can read more about the security releases.

Full release notes are available.

Welcome to the fastest version of Review Board yet.

1.6.10 is chock full of performance enhancements. It's lighter on your web servers and on your database and noticeably faster. Review requests load almost instantly and the diff viewer renders diffs faster.

You know those "X minutes ago" timestamps? They weren't very cache-friendly, and required a reload to update. Now they're live, even when viewing a cached page. The timestamps everywhere in the UI will update as time ticks away.

There are also some fixes for diffs with very long lines (generally for datasets or minified files), fixes for Mercurial repositories, and fixes for excessive update checks on a review request.

There was a lot of internal work done for these optimizations. We have been dogfooding this pretty heavily, but please let us know if you find any regressions.

Full release notes are available.