What's New in Review Board

Just in time for the holidays, we've released Review Board 1.1 alpha 2. This is a pretty significant release with many new features that users have been asking for for some time. We'd like to get this release heavily tested, but remember that it is an alpha release, and is best set up on a non-production system.

Some of the new features in this release include:

• HTTPS Subversion repository support
• SSH-backed repository support for Bazaar, CVS, Git, Mercurial, and Subversion
• Amazon S3 storage for screenshots
• Captchas for new user registration, to reduce spam

Full release notes are available.

Going forward, we're hoping to have a beta out by mid-December. This may be pushed out to January, depending on holiday schedules and how much testing this release gets. We may sneak another feature or two for the beta, but after that the focus is on a solid release.

We'd also like to dedicate this release to Vinay Venkatesh, a good friend and co-worker of ours who passed away earlier this month. He was a long-time supporter of the project, helped us keep our sanity during difficult times, and helped with ideas and suggestions for the project. Thanks for everything, Vinay.

Tonight we released Review Board 1.0.5, a small bug fix release that fixes a handful of issues reported in some installations.

The main issue fixed that affected most people was that a previous version of Djblets, one of our dependencies, broke compatibility with Internet Explorer 6 and up. Review Board 1.0.4 required this version, meaning that users of Internet Explorer faced problems with anything involving a text area. We now require the newer version, 0.5.5, which resolves this problem.

Binary files and diff expansion were broken in previous releases, but are now fixed in 1.0.5. There are a handful of other fixes for Active Directory, the administration UI, and large bug numbers.

The one new "feature" in this release is that we now inform users on the New Review Request page about the existance of post-review, with a brief description and a link to the documentation. We're hoping more people will start to use post-review, improving their experience with Review Board.

Full release notes are available.

Updated: A bug was found making the New Review Request page unusable. A 1.0.5.1 release has been made to fix this issue.

Google Chrome fan? You'll like this release.

Tonight we released Review Board 1.0.4, which brings one of the most highly-requested features: Google Chrome compatibility. On older versions, Chrome had numerous problems with text areas and the screenshot commenting feature, which are now fixed. Chrome users should now find Review Board to be much more usable.

Opera got some much-needed love as well. Newer versions of Opera had some problems with uploading diffs and screenshots, which should now work in this release.

That's not all, though. Several small bugs were fixed with diff caching, CVS, replies to comments on interdiffs, Active Directory, LDAP, and more.

Full release notes are available.

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally pushed out a release of RBTools 0.2 beta 2.

This is a large bug fix release, fixing several issues with ClearCase, Git, Mercurial, Perforce and Subversion. It also introduces several new features, such as installing post-review.exe on Windows.

This version is required if you want to use post-review against our own Review Board server, or any Review Board server using repositories on GitHub.

Full release notes are available.

We've been hard at work since the release of Review Board 1.0 on our next major release, Review Board 1.1. Several several great features for users and administrators have been developed, with more to come.

Tonight, we've released Review Board 1.1 alpha 1. Highlights include:

• Update notification bubbles. Little update bubbles appear in the bottom-right of the review request and diff viewer changes when the review request or diff has been updated, or when a review or reply has been posted. No more reloading the review request with the hope that somebody has responded since you last reloaded.
• Better auto-complete. When auto-completing users or groups, the first name and last name are now searched along with the username. We also now show the first and last name in the results.
• Upload screenshots by drag-and-drop. You can now drag-and-drop screenshots from your file manager into the review request to upload them. Right now, this functionality requires a modern version of Google Gears. (Note that, unfortunately, this is broken with Google Gears v0.5.32.0 when used with Firefox 3.5+, but they have a fix coming.)
• HTML e-mails. The e-mails sent out for review request updates and review discussion now have an HTML version sent, which contains the portions of diffs or screenshots reviewed, much like the review request page. Users using e-mail clients set not to show HTML e-mails will see the original text-only e-mails.
• Showing/hiding whitespace-only changes. Lines in the diff viewer containing only whitespace changes (such as removing trailing whitespace for a line) can now be hidden on-the-fly, making it easier to review some changes.
• Easier repository configuration. Configuring a repository entry against Bitbucket, GitHub, Google Code or SourceForge code repositories is now really easy. You won't need to figure out the repository URLs for these services. We also make it easy to configure the repository with several different bug trackers, which include Bugzilla, Trac, and the bug trackers on Bitbucket, Google Code, Redmine and SourceForge.
• Remote Git support. It's now much easier to configure Review Board with Git repositories. Instead of keeping a copy of the Git repository always up-to-date on the Review Board server, you can now configure Review Board to use gitosis, cgit, gitweb, GitHub, or another web front-end to fetch files from a Git repository.
• Filterable server log. The Review Board server log can be viewed from within the Administration UI. You can sort by date or filter by date range and severity.

These are just some of the changes made in Review Board 1.1 alpha 1. See the release notes for all the changes.

We strive to make each release as stable as can be, but with any alpha release, there will probably be some bugs. We would love to see people beta test these releases, but please don't use this on a production server!

To install Review Board 1.1 alpha 1, you can run:

$ easy_install -f http://downloads.review-board.org/releases/ReviewBoard/1.1/ -U ReviewBoard

See Installing Development Releases for more details.

Last night's 1.0.2 release had two fairly critical bugs. The first being that, due to some code shuffle in the tree, the web server configuration templates weren't bundled with Review Board, making initial installations fail. The second bug only manifested if you had Django 1.0.2 installed. We required some functionality that only existed in 1.0.3 and higher, but didn't specify this requirement for the package.

The new 1.0.3 release is now out, and fixes these two problems. We now require Django 1.1 or higher. This brings with it a number of stability and speed improvements behind the scenes. It also gives administrators a new ability to batch delete items in the database, which can be useful when cleaning up spam or test comments. In the future we'll add new batch edit functionality based on this.

Full release notes are available.

Update: The upgrade to Django 1.1 broke the styles for the administration UI. A 1.0.3.1 patch release is available which just fixes the styles in the administration UI.

Over the past few weeks, we've been hard at work fixing many bugs impacting our users and improving error handling. Tonight, we bring to you Review Board 1.0.2.

This release contains fixes for 17 bugs. Many of these have impacted quite a number of end users and administrators since 1.0, so we highly recommend upgrading. This release will also help with diagnosing of new bugs that cause Internal Server Errors, as we do a better job of logging crashes.

Full release notes are available.

Review Board 1.0.1 was released, which contains bug fixes and minor feature enhancements.

This release fixes several first-time install problems people have had with Review Board 1.0. Particularly bugs on Windows with finding cvs.exe, a missing ClearCase repository type, and installing patch or patch.exe for the first time. It also introduces compatibility with Mercurial 1.3.

Full release notes are available.

After nearly two and a half years of development, over 2000 commits, and contributions from over 120 people, we are proud and excited to bring to you the culmination of our work: Review Board 1.0.

A lot has been put into this release. There were many times in the past where we wanted to just get 1.0 out the door, but decided to wait until the time was ready. We believe it was worth the wait.

The release notes are up, giving an overview of Review Board 1.0 and listing some small changes since RC3. If you're new to Review Board, we recommend reading through the release notes and checking out the screenshots.

For those in the Bay Area, we're planning to throw a release party on July 11th somewhere around Palo Alto, CA. The location is still being worked out, but the plan is to find a restaurant and meet up for drinks and food. It's a great opportunity to meet the developers and other users. Anyone is invited, so if you want to join us, please RSVP.

Thanks to everyone who has helped contribute to this release! Without the bug reports, code contributions and financial support we've received, Review Board would not be where it is today.

Over the next few months we'll be putting together the 1.1 release with some cool new features and improved usability and setup. Stay tuned!

Today brings what should be the final RC release before Review Board 1.0!

RC2 introduced a slowdown with a particular SQL query on the All Review Requests page that caused problems on large installations. Not only has that query been fixed, but further optimizations have been made to our queries to speed up the dashboard and other pages even more.

At this point, we're confident in our 1.0 release. Aside from the slowdown, we haven't seen any other showstopper issues. Assuming we don't see any this week, we plan to release 1.0 next weekend.

New Features:

• rb-site.exe is now provided on Windows and installed in the Python path, making installation easier. (Bug #1110)
• Added a loading indicator for the news display in the Adminsitration Dashboard.
• Automatically updates the stored path for media files when moving the site directory. Previously, this would break with no easy way to fix it, but now Review Board notices the move and updates the stored media directory properly.
• Added support for parent diffs for Mercurial. Patch by Colin Caughie.

Bugs Fixed:

• Fixed some major speed problems on large installs. One of the queries on the All Review Requests page could take an unusually long amount of time to finish when ran against a large number of review requests, which on some database setups could stall other queries, which would affect all users. These have been resolved. A side effect of this is that the "Last Updated" column in the dashboard may revert back to the "Last Updated" time on the review request after the upgrade to RC3, but this is a one-time issue and should be at worst an annoyance. (Bug #1144).
• Reduced concurrency issues when saving multiple comments when the server is slow. This could lead to broken reviews, causing errors. We now queue up the saves so that we don't attempt to save multiple comments at once.
• Fixed issues where files with \r\r\n newlines would break the diff viewer. This can happen in some Perforce setups when dealing with a file checked out from one platform and modified on another. Patch by Raghu Kaippully. (Bug #1071)
• Interdiffs containing two files with different revisions but the same content no longer displays an error. (Bug #1032)
• Properly marked the Password field as a password field in the Add/Change Repository form in the Administration UI. Patch by Sharan Rao. (Bug #942)
• The "Ship It" column now has the appropriate style on the All Review Requests page. (Bug #1115)
• Reduce the chances of concurrency issues internally when saving the Comment and ScreenshotComment database models. (Bug #709)
• Nercurial's HTTP support would fail when the repository served up raw files using the /raw-file URL instead of /raw. Our Mercurial support now tries both paths before giving up. This provides compatibility with http://bitbucket.org.
• The LDAP support no longer breaks when e-mail information isn't provided by either the LDAP settings or the server. An error in this case is now logged to the Review Board log file. Patch by Paolo Borelli.
• Improved the checks for the Git binary and for a valid repository in our Git support. Patch by Alexey Morozov.
• A review request with a bug number no longer causes a 500 error when the bug tracker URL doesn't have a "%s" in it. Patch by Paolo Borelli.
• Fixed the link for deleting a screenshot when on the diff viewer page. It was pointing to the wrong path. (Bug #1147)