What's New in Review Board

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.

Review Board 1.6.2 is out. It's a bug fix release that takes care of several issues people have hit. In particular, it should have a proper Apache WSGI configuration for subdirectory installs out of the box, some SCM integration fixes, browser compatibility improvements, and various other things.

We also have a couple bits of new API for those who want to automate review group creation, or archive deprecated repositories.Check out the release notes for the full list.

RBTools 0.3.4 is out. It features an authentication fix for users on RBCommons, fixes for --guess-summary with newlines on Git, solves diff uploading problems on Python 2.7, and adds a new --change-description parameter.

Full release notes are available.

Hot on the tails of 1.6, we have an important security update and bug fix release. 1.6.1 bumps our required Django version to 1.3.1, which contains a number of important security fixes.

It also fixes the counters bug that many people have noticed in the dashboard, where the number of review requests is listed as 0 or a negative number. This was caused by an incorrect default value set when upgrading. Upgrading to 1.6.1 will fix this default, and reset the counts for all users. You should see correct values the next time you use the dashboard.

Release notes are available.

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.