What's New in Review Board

Those who have upgraded to Review Board 1.6.0 have no doubt noticed some problems with a few of the counters on the side of the Dashboard. Several may be set to 0, or in the negatives. This is an annoying bug, and many have reported it to us.

Don't worry, though, we were prepared for such things! You can reset your counters by typing:

rb-site manage /path/to/site fixreviewcounts

The counters should fix themselves the next time you're signed on. Now, any users who haven't logged in since the upgrade may find themselves hitting this bug again. Just re-run the same command and it'll solve it.

The upcoming 1.6.1 release will fix the bug and will perform a counter reset on your install. This should take care of it for everybody. You can expect that this weekend.

That's a wrap, people. Review Board 1.6 is done, and ready to be installed.

1.6 is a major release, which focuses on better review workflows, faster reviews, access control, generic file attachments, speed improvements, and much, much more. The entire list of features are covered in our release notes.

Before upgrading, we recommend that you back up your database and your site directory, in case anything goes wrong. If you do have problems, you can reach us on our mailing list.

From here on out, we'll be focusing on Review Board 1.6.x releases alongside the upcoming 2.0 release, which will feature support for using third party extensions.

Note: If you're staying with Review Board 1.5.x releases, you will need to be careful how you upgrade to new 1.5.x releases. Instead of the usual:

$easy_install -U ReviewBoard

$ easy_install -U ReviewBoard==version

Where version would be 1.5.6 or whatever version you're upgrading to. Otherwise, you will end up upgrading to Review Board 1.6.

Again, let us know if you hit any issues. A lot has changed in this release, and we'll probably be shaking out a few bugs with the new features over the next few point releases.

Review Board 1.5.6 is out the door, packed with some good fixes and a couple small feature additions. Many of these are fixes backported from the in-development 1.6 releases.

Of note are fixes for caching large diffs/files, fixes for screenshot captions on drafts, performance improvements in syntax highlighting (if you haven't installed recently or upgraded Pygments), and support for Fedora Hosted as a hosting service.

See the release notes for the complete list.

RBTools 0.3.3 is out the door, and it's a biggie. There's fixes and goodies for pretty much everybody.

Git received a lot of fixes in this release, as did post-review itself. One of the biggest set of changes, though, that I'd like to call to attention is Jan Koprowski's wonderful work in rewriting our Clear Case support. He put in a lot of effort and fixed a number of problems with the old implementation. Thanks Jan!

We're hard at work on some large-scale changes to RBTools. The 0.4.0 release is in progress, and it'll form the foundation of the 1.0 release. Soon we'll have a new set of tools that can be used to interact with Review Board, and a Python API that developers can use to talk to Review Board. Exciting stuff! Stay tuned.

For now, see the release notes for the full list of changes.

Those paying close attention may have noticed we haven't released Review Board 1.6 yet. And you may have wondered what's holding the release up. Well, there are two main things.

First, some of our users have hit problems upgrading to Review Board 1.6 RC2 from previous 1.6 betas. This seems to be limited to some subset of our users, and it's not clear whether it's a bug on our end or not, but I want to understand the circumstances surrounding this problem before we perform the actual release.

Second, the 1.6 manual isn't finished yet. We try to fully update the manual before the release, but this does inevitably delay things. We're working on getting someone who can in the future help out on documentation updates, in order to speed up the releases.

Once we're satisfied with the above items, we'll do a release. In the meantime, if you're looking to start using 1.6 sooner, you certainly can! The RC 2 release is largely what we're shipping in 1.6, excluding a couple of small fixes. However, please do a test upgrade on a copy of the database to ensure you don't run into the problem above. And if you do run into it, let us know! More data will help us to solve this faster.

So.. close..

Review Board 1.6 RC2 is out the door and packed full of fixes, polish, and a few new features that snuck in.

Yes, we may have done a bit more in this release than we anticipated, but it's turned out really well, and will make for a strong final 1.6. We've fixed a number of usability problems (losing changes when leaving the page or accidentally canceling), added some great new features, improving the API, and fixing a good handful of bugs.

Some of the new features include:

• File attachment drag-and-drop. Files can now be dragged and dropped onto the page and uploaded as either screenshots or file attachments. The UI for drag-and-drop has greatly improved.

• Close descriptions. After discarding a review request or marking it as submitted, you can leave a description. You can use this to tell what revision it was committed in, or why the change was discarded. Up to you!
• Confirmation before accidentally losing changes. Ever accidentally hit cancel or navigate away from a page when typing a new description? Now you'll be prompted before you lose what you worked on.

Those are a few of the user-facing improvements made, but there are many improvements for administrators as well, including HTTP Basic Auth support when accessing Git repositories, Perforce stunnel support, and better instructions when things go wrong (new Manual Updates pages).

For the full list, see the release notes.

We're frozen at this point for the final release. Only critical bug fixes will go in. Otherwise, we're working on docs, and should be done with the release soon. So if you're planning to upgrade to 1.6, please give RC2 a try, because it won't be much different from the final 1.6.

One step closer to the finale. Tonight we released Review Board 1.6 RC1, which is full of bug fixes and some fantastic new features.

The highlights of this release are file attachments, private profiles, Private GitHub Organizations, and performance enhancements. Let's break a couple of those down.

The file attachment support makes it possible to upload any type of file to a review request. Tarballs containing important resources to commit that can't appear in the diff viewer, log files, sample data, or anything else. Reviewers can add a comment on the file, which will show up in the review.

Private profiles allow users to prevent other users from seeing their e-mail address on their user page or through the API. The name is also stripped from both locations, though not from review requests themselves. This feature is mostly geared toward open source projects.

There's also many bug fixes and improvements. All of which can be found in the release notes.

We'll be polishing things up, fixing a couple more bugs, and then getting the final 1.6 out the door hopefully soon. Stay tuned, and let us know if you hit any problems!

UPDATE: 1.6 beta 2 is re-released! We had to pull the update due to some PostgreSQL regressions and an annoying visual problem on every page. Whether you downloaded 1.6 beta 2 before or are on 1.6 beta 1, grab this update!

Fresh out of the oven is the new 1.6 beta 2 release. It smells of warm chocolate chip cookies and awesome new features. Some of the key highlights:

• Basic issue tracking. Reviewers can mark a comment as a defect in the code, and reviewers will get a handy UI under the comment for quickly marking that defect as resolved. It's like replying with "Fixed," but with less typing!
• Quick search. Every install now has a search field with quick search enabled. Type some part of a user's name, a group name, a review request summary, or a review request ID, and immediately search results will appear below the box.
• Better review draft banners. The draft banners now stay on screen while any part of a review is being shown. No more hunting for the top of the review for the banner.

There's way more in this release, but those are some of the most common user-visible changes. Much work has been put into this beta, from us and from many contributors, so please check it out.

See the release notes for more information.

We plan for one more beta/RC before the final release with a few more features and fixes.

Review Board 1.5.5 is out, which is a pretty standard bug fix release with a variety of fixes here and there, plus a new and convenient link on the Add/Change Repository pages to show the current SSH key.

There are some good fixes for crashes that could happen in rare occasions in the diff viewer and admin UIs, fixes to image fetching in HTML e-mails, fixes for conflicting change numbers across multiple Perforce repositories, and more.

One real important fix, which is the main reason for tonight's release, is that one of our dependencies, python-dateutil, recently released a new version that was only compatible with Python 3. Due to Review Board requesting the latest and greatest, we'd attempt to install it, which would cause problems. If you've recently tried installing Review Board (just over the past couple of days) and have hit strange errors, try finding and removing your python_dateutil directory and install Review Board 1.5.5.

Release notes are available with the complete list of fixes.

Finally, definitive proof that when I don't sleep, good things happen.

Tonight (this morning?) we've released Review Board 1.6 beta 1, and there's a lot of awesome things for users and administrators alike.

Prior to 1.6, administrators that wished to limit access to repositories for different users (say, main engineering and contractors) would need to set up different Review Board deployments, which means double the maintenance and upgrade work. Anyone with access to a Review Board server had access to everything on it. No longer.

1.6 introduces access control, allowing administrators to create invite-only groups, hidden groups, and limit repository access to certain users/groups. These are all set up on the Group and Repository database pages in the administration UI. Now, you can ensure that people have access only to what they're allowed access to.

We've put together a special form of access control: Local site divisions. This is a special feature still undergoing development. it allows a single Review Board instance to be split up into different divisions that each have their own list of users, repositories, groups, and review requests. Handy for giving QA, engineering, and contractors their own separate sites, for instance. Users can only view their site (and therefore the dashboard, review request lists, groups, repositories, etc.) if they belong to that site, and it's up to administrators to decide that. This is an experimental feature and will undergo continued development over the next couple releases.

On top of all that, we've greatly enhanced our authentication backend support. Companies or organizations who have developed custom authentication backends in the past know how much a pain it is to use them with Review Board. We've fixed that in 1.6. Review Board now scans for authentication backends that comply with the new API and shows them in the list alongside Active Directory, LDAP, etc. Authentication backends can provide their own settings forms, can list the things they support (changing e-mail addresses or passwords, for instance), and then handle those types of changes.

Not to be left out, we have some great features for users as well. One-click Ship It!, collapsible reviews, Plastic SCM support, improved user pages, and user info bubbles, just to name a few.

For the full list of features in 1.6, see the release notes.

Our goal is to get through the beta cycle fast and get the final 1.6 release out the door in a couple months time. If you're planning to beta test 1.6, please let us know if you run into any problems (or even if things are working well).