What's New in Review Board

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'

Tonight we released RBTools 0.3, the latest and greatest update since 0.2. RBTools, aka "That thing post-review lives in," supports the new API in Review Board 1.5.x and contains fixes and enhancements for CVS, Subversion, ClearCase, Mercurial, Perforce, and more.

The are so many improvements in this release, but two big highlights I'd like to point out are the support for the new Review Board 1.5.x API, and the addition of Plastic SCM support.

Review Board 1.5.x's new API is extensive, and we're working to make RBTools take advantage of it. To start with, we've updated post-review to make use of it, which is important because the old API is going away in the upcoming Review Board 1.6 release. The plan is to introduce new scripts alongside post-review that call into the new API, replicating nearly all of the web UI's functionality from the command line. At the same time, we'll have a Python API that developers can use to talk to Review Board. All this will happen for the RBTools 1.0 release.

As I mentioned, we received Plastic SCM support by way of Dick Porter, one of the Plastic SCM developers. This is a new cross-platform DVCS provided by Codice Software, with professional and community editions. It's meant to work with the Plastic SCM support going into Review Board 1.6. If you're using Plastic SCM, you should be able to start using Review Board and Plastic SCM together soon.

There was also a big push for improvements to ClearCase, Mercurial, and Perforce. I'd like to thank Jan Koprowski for the ClearCase work, Dan Buch for Mercurial, and Ben Hollis for Perforce. And of course, there were many other contributors with critical bug fixes and enhancements in this release.

For the full list of changes and contributors, see the release notes.

Please note: If you're using Review Board 1.5.x and after upgrading to RBTools 0.3 you can't log in, you may have an incompatible WSGI configuration. Please see the FAQ entry on fixing this.

Happy New Year, everyone! Hopefully everyone's had a good holiday and start of the new year. We've been hard at work through the holidays on many improvements to Review Board, and tonight have released 1.5.2.

Review Board 1.5.2 is a fairly substantial and critical feature and bug fix release. It fixes many of the problems developers have encountered with the new API we introduced in 1.5, particularly with authentication. Developers working with our API should consider the 1.5.2 release to be the minimum requirement from here on out.

If you're using WSGI, it's very important that you read the release notes for updating your configuration, or you'll hit problems with the API in the future.

Administrators trying to set up SSH-backed repositories, particularly private GitHub repositories (both standard and GitHub Organizations) should now have a much easier time getting going. We've introduced SSH key management to make it easy to generate new SSH keys, upload existing ones, or view the public key for an existing key. Review Board will be able to use the configured SSH key to access SSH-backed repositories without having to change the home directory for the web server's user.

There are many other fixes in this release. I've only mentioned a couple of them. See the release notes for everything else in this release.

Review Board 1.5.1 has been released. It's a small bug fix release that fixes a few small problems, including lighttpd installation, serialization problems with the API's XML output, breakages with SCons files, and better error reporting for Git repositories with incorrect permissions, to name a few.

It's a pretty small, safe release with no real emergency fixes, but it's worth an upgrade, particularly if you're affected by one of the problems.

Full release notes are available.

At long last, after just over a year of development, we present to you for your consideration... Review Board 1.5!

Review Board 1.5 is a major release with many new features for users, administrators, and third party developers. We have improved usability, improved error feedback and logging, and made it easier to review changes.

Users will see notification bubbles when a review request is updated and improved e-mails with fragments of diffs and screenshots. They'll see when code blocks have moved in the diff viewer, see which class or function a block of code is in, and better control how they see whitespace. Comment regions are more clear in the diff viewer. Reviewing on an iPhone and iPad now works. Screenshots can be uploaded by dragging them from the file manager into the page. Auto-complete matches first and last names, and group names.

Administrators can more easily create and manage repositories and bug trackers on various services. They can decide which ones are shown and which are not. They can view and filter the Review Board log file when diagnosing problems. Offload uploaded data to Amazon S3. Write custom management commands for administering Review Board.

Remote Git repositories are now possible. Repositories over HTTPS or SSH can be added and accessed without complex workarounds.

Third party developers have a much more powerful, flexible, and manageable API for integrating Review Board into their applications and services. They can do most of what Review Board's own web UI can do. They can even implement custom diff viewers if needed.

This is just part of the feature set of Review Board 1.5. See the full release notes for all the great things in this release.

At this point, all of our work will focus on 1.5 and the upcoming 1.6. The goal is to keep the 1.6 release shorter with a smaller feature set. We likely won't be releasing any 1.0.x releases unless major security problems are found.

If you are using Review Board 1.0.x, performing an upgrade will automatically install 1.5. You can upgrade by typing:

$ easy_install -U ReviewBoard

If you want to stay on the 1.0.x branch, you need make sure you upgrade to the exact version you want by specifying it during package installation. For example:

$ easy_install -U ReviewBoard==1.0.9

Thanks to everyone who helped make this release possible! That includes all those who have helped spread Review Board in your organization. If you use Review Board and would like to come celebrate with us, please let us know through this simple form.