What's New in Review Board

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).

Review Board 1.5.4 is out the door, with some good bug fixes and new API functionality some people have been asking for.

We've extended the new API to bring back support for updating change numbers on review requests, and to update review requests based on change numbers. The next release of post-review will use this when working with Perforce.

There's also new API for creating, modifying, and removing repositories, which should help for large deployments tracking hundreds of Git repositories. The Repository API documentation go into some detail on this.

Along with that, we have several small fixes for problems reported since 1.5. Most only affect certain users.

Release notes are available with the complete list of fixes and improvements.

Perforce users who switched to Review Board 1.5.2 and RBTools 0.3.1 this week hit an unfortunate problem updating review requests with change numbers. It turns out there's a validation error in our new API involving change numbers, which we'll be getting to soon.

For now, RBTools 0.3.2 is out the door, and works around this breakage by falling back to the old API. If you're on Perforce, you'll want to upgrade and make sure things are back to normal. Sorry about that!

There's also a fix for parsing CVSROOTs that don't have a username in the path, and choosing Mercurial over Perforce in a Perforce repository when there's an existing Mercurial user configuration.

As always, release notes are available.

Another release tonight! This time, Review Board 1.5.3.

After our 1.5.2 release, some users hit issues with the new SSH infrastructure. In particular, Windows users, CVS users, and Bazaar users hit different problems. We've ironed them out and put together a new testing infrastructure here to make sure they keep working. If you've been bitten by 1.5.2 and SSH, please try this release out and let us know how it goes.

Along with this, we've updated our API so that RBTools 0.3.1 (and any other clients) can use a repository name instead of a path when creating a new review request. This greatly simplifies setting things up when there are lots of possible repository paths involved. See the RBTools 0.3.1 release announcement for some more information on this.

There are also a few other fixes thrown in. See the release notes for more information.

RBTools 0.3.1 is out the door, with an important crash fix for users running Review Board versions older than 1.5.2, and a brand new feature sure to make administrators a bit happier.

Starting in 0.3.1, .reviewboardrc has gained a new configuration option, REPOSITORY. This can be used to override what repository information is sent to the Review Board server when creating a new review request. You can give it a different path, or, with the upcoming Review Board 1.5.3, you can give it the name of the repository (the same name you'd see for it in the New Review Request page).

This is particularly useful when repositories are SSH-backed and include a username. If you have more than two possible paths to a repository, you can choose the one to send to the server with this setting. Your upstream repository you want to use may be svn+ssh://bob@example.com/var/lib/svn, but your users may be using their own usernames instead of "bob." In these cases, you can set something like the following in your project's .reviewboardrc:

REPOSITORY = 'svn+ssh://bob@example.com/var/lib/svn'

REPOSITORY = 'My Repository'