What's New in Review Board

Updated 25-April-2012 at 6:25PM: People have become concerned about the 1MB limit and how it will apply to binary files in your changesets. Don't worry! Binary files don't count to the 1MB limit. Just code changes.

Review Board 1.6.6 is out! The biggest change is that you can now fetch the API tokens for your private GitHub repositories directly on the repository configuration page. This is necessary as they've removed the API tokens listing on the GitHub account pages, in preparation for a move to the new API.

Another important change to note is that we've limited the size of uploaded diffs to 1MB. We've found that diffs that are larger than this tend to bog down the server, particularly on large deployments, and that diffs of that size are generally too difficult to review.

We suspect that for the most part, people won't hit too many problems with these. The exceptions are for very large, auto-generated bits of code, which probably aren't worthy of review anyway, and very large parent diffs. If you are hit by this for legitimate reasons, please let us know. We can still tweak this limit, but want to see how this goes.

Release notes are available.

As previously mentioned, GitHub is transitioning to a new API and will be soon deprecating the version that Review Board speaks. We've been hard at work on this move (which brings with it a better repository configuration experience and the groundwork for tighter integration with GitHub and other services).

In the meantime, new users have been unable to link with private GitHub repositories, since GitHub no longer supplies the required API Token anywhere on the account page.

But good news! There is a workaround. If you have curl installed (common on Linux), you can request your API token by doing the following:

    $ curl -u github_username https://api.github.com/legacy/token

Enter your password when prompted. The result should show you your API token, which you can paste right into your repository configuration page.

We'll be sending out a release soon that will make it easier to get your API token when configuring the repository, followed by a new release with the GitHub API v3 additions in the following week or two. We want to make sure it's rock-solid first.

If you have any questions, we're always available on our mailing list.

Hello everyone.

GitHub has recently announced that they will soon be removing their older version 1.0 and 2.0 APIs, in favor of the newer version 3 API. This is scheduled to take place on May 1st, 2012.

Some users have already noticed that they have removed the API Token field, meaning that new GitHub Private and Private Organization accounts can't be accessed by Review Board today. We are in contact with GitHub and I'm hoping we'll have a solution to that.

Review Board uses the version 2.0 API to fetch files from GitHub, meaning that any installations using GitHub will stop working on May 1st. We are hard at work on moving to the version 3.0 API, and will have an update as soon as we can verify things are working properly. This will be Review Board 1.6.6.

There will be some manual steps required to get your GitHub repositories working again in 1.6.6. It will involve editing the repository entry, re-selecting GitHub, and authorizing an account. This will fetch the new OAuth2 API tokens from GitHub. Once you've done this, your repository will work again.

Further details will be provided as soon as we have a release.

Review Board 1.5.x users will need to upgrade to 1.6.6 in order to use their GitHub repositories.

Please contact our mailing list if you have any questions or concerns.

We just put out a small maintenance release of Review Board 1.6.5 tonight. This has a couple small changes that may be useful to users of Git or the web API.

The biggest change, however, is that it actually will install properly on new installations. The Django project just released their version 1.4, and Review Board 1.6.x is incompatible with it. Now, we hard-code the latest compatible version of Django.

If you recently tried installing Review Board on a new system, please try removing your version of Django 1.4 and install Review Board 1.6.5.

Release notes are available.

A few regressions were noted in RBTools 0.4.0. In particular, Python 2.4 support broke, and the --diff-filename= option broke with STDIN and --username and --password provided.

These have been fixed, and we've released 0.4.1. Give it a try, and please let us know of any more regressions.

Release notes are available.

A couple small bugs crept in to 1.6.4 that affected users sorting by the Review ID column in the Dashboard and the saving of cache backend settings. We've put out a small 1.6.4.1 release that fixes these problems.

Release notes are available.

Review Board 1.6.4 is out the door!

This is primarily a bug fix release, but with a few added goodies.

Administrators trying to move Review Board to a different type of database (for example, SQLite to MySQL) can now use new database dumping and loading management commands. These will store the database in a database-agnostic format and load them back in. It's not a fast process, but should make life a lot easier in these situations.

Some changes were made to the webapi for compatibility with future RBTools releases. The 0.5.0 release will end up requiring at least Review Board 1.6.4.

Along with these, there's a new hosting service entry for Codebase HQ, issue tracking checkboxes in the Review dialog, and diff viewer improvements for Objective-C++ .mm files. And, of course, a large number of bug fixes.

Release notes are available.

RBTools 0.4.0 is out! There's some great improvements that some of you will like, but more than anything, it's the first step toward a brand new, more exciting RBTools.

The highlights of 0.4.0 include:

• Most command line options can now be set automatically in .reviewboardrc files. This includes such things as the branch, Perforce configuration, --submit-as, and more.
• Added a -g (--guess-fields) that works as a convenience for --guess-summary --guess-description.
• The system's HTTP(S) proxy can be disabled with --disable-proxy.
• Numerous other bug fixes.

One of the big changes for this release is internal. We're starting to build a Python API that will talk to Review Board servers, which would be usable by other applications. It's not close to ready yet, but a couple of the large parts have been done for this release. In particular, the SCMClients, which talk to the various tools like Git and Subversion, have been refactored out into reusable classes. Down the road, it will be possible to have third-party modules that extend post-review's client support.

Before long, we'll be dropping support for the old Review Board API found in Review Board 1.0 and early 1.5 versions. This should be considered the last release to support the old API.

Release notes are available.

As many of you are undoubtedly aware, there is a piece of legislation named SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) in the United States that is undergoing much criticism and debate. In its current form, it has the potential to do much damage to the Internet as we know it, and it has a long list of companies and open source projects that are against it. We are one of them.

You may also be aware that GoDaddy, a domain registrar famous for using scantily clad women to advertise domain name purchases, was not only backing SOPA but actively helped draft bits of it. As a result, many tech companies and projects are moving away from GoDaddy as part of a "Move Your Domain Day" this December 29th. Again, we are one of them.

We don't anticipate much downtime, but if you find you have trouble reaching this site, please be patient. It may take time for the DNS records to update, and with the mass exodus away from GoDaddy, there may be other unexpected delays. We should be moved over shortly.

It was brought to our attention today that Review Board 1.5.x and 1.6.x had a security vulnerability involving browser-side script injection in the diff viewer and screenshot pages. We take such things seriously, and are putting out a couple of releases to fix it. We strongly advise everyone to update, especially if you're running a public server.

Review Board 1.5.7 and 1.6.3 have been released. If you're running 1.6.x, just upgrade as normal, but if you're running 1.5.x, you need to upgrade by doing:

$ sudo easy_install -U ReviewBoard==1.5.7

Otherwise, you'll automatically upgrade to 1.6.x.

Thanks to Damian Johnson for letting us know about this vulnerability and providing a patch to fix it.