What's New in Review Board

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.

Another day, another release! We've been working to shake out the bugs from the hosting service change, and following the ol' open source mantra, "Release early, release often." Fixing regressions is important to us, and the reports people have been filing have been very helpful, so we'll continue to do this quick releases as long as necessary.

That said, things are looking pretty good, and our test suite is only growing.

Tonight's release fixes some problems some users have had with GitHub private repositories, a regression in key input on the diff viewer page, and creating new review requests not tied to a repository.

We also now log when you're getting low on GitHub API calls remaining, as determined by GitHub's rate limiting system.

Release notes are available.

Thanks to people's quick feedback, we've made some important fixes to the new hosting service support. This covers the configuration of repositories, and some fixes in error reporting and diff uploading using the New Review Request form with GitHub. We recommend that everyone on 1.6.7 updates to this release.

Release notes are available.

Today we bring you a very important release, especially to those of you on GitHub. Please read this post carefully.

We've been doing major work on new hosting service integration support in Review Board. This provides, for the first time, direct knowledge of repository hosting service APIs and account linking, removing the need for copy-and-pasted API tokens and hacks.

This feature is critical for GitHub users, as sometime soon (likely this month or next), GitHub will be switching off their old v2 API (which Review Board has traditionally used to fetch files) and moving to the new v3 API.

If you are a GitHub user of any sort, you must upgrade! Failure to do so will mean your repositories may not work soon.

Once you have upgraded, you will need to go into each configured repository and set it up again as a GitHub repository. This will have you link an account on GitHub to your repository. Unfortunately, this is not something we can automate, but you shouldn't have to do this again. Once you've finished, you should be set for when GitHub terminates their old API.

This is a large change to Review Board, and we have been careful to test it thoroughly, but lab testing and real-world testing don't always show the same results. If you have any problem with your repository, please contact us.

If you feel more comfortable, you can create a new, temporary repository, link it to your account, and ensure that works. If there is a problem, report it, and you can continue to use your old repositories until GitHub switches off the API.

In the future, this new support will allow us to provide a more seamless repository configuration process and features specific to hosting services, as well as deeper bug tracker integration.

Along with the hosting service code, this release also provides compatibility with Plastic SCM v4.0, makes the max diff size limit configurable, and fixes a few bugs in the product.

See the release notes for more information.

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.

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.