Review Board 1.5 Beta 1 Release Notes¶

Move detection in the diff viewer.

The diff viewer now indicates when a block of code has moved from one location to another. Previously, if code had moved, the diff viewer would only show inserts and deletes, leaving it unclear as to whether code was changed during the move. Now, these regions contain special tags on the side that indicate where the line was moved to. Clicking on these tags will jump to the source or destination for that particular line, briefly highlighting the line.

This was a Google Summer of Code 2009 project by Eduardo Felipe Castegnaro.

Function/class headers for collapsed regions in the diff viewer. (Bug #114)

The diff viewer will now show function or class information for collapsed regions. These are also shown in the parts of the diff commented on in the review request page and HTML e-mails.

The functions/classes shown are the closest ones found to the collapsed region, and as much may not be exactly where the code in the region lives, but should serve as a good guide as to where the code is in the file.

Support for function/class headers exists for C, C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby files.

Screenshot drag-and-drop now works with newer HTML 5-capable browsers.

Previously, our screenshot drag-and-drop support required Google Gears, and was broken on the more modern Firefox releases. We have since removed the Google Gears support and moved to require newer browsers that support the file drag-and-drop support in HTML 5. To date, this has been tested with Firefox 3.6. It should work in newer Google Chrome and Safari browsers, but this has not yet been tested.

Support for private GitHub repositories.

We now have a new Hosting Type in the Repository configuration page for private GitHub repositories. Simply select GitHub (Private) to configure Review Board to access your private repository.

This requires an API token, which can be found on the GitHub user account page.

Improved error reporting in Git.

If a diff upload failed for whatever reason, there was no log information provided to show what had gone wrong. Now we log the reason for the failure in the log file.

We also log any errors with accessing a Git repository, which may help diagnose some problems.

Improved error reporting in Subversion.

We now log attempts to access information on a Subversion repository, as well as any error information when accessing the repository fails.

Added new Branch and Bugs columns to the dashboard.

The Branch column is sortable and displays the branch specified on the review request.

The Bugs column is a comma-separated list of bugs referenced in the review request. This column is not sortable.

Patch by Alex Harvey. (Bug #1441)

Improved performance in the diff viewer.

Some work was done to improve performance in the diff viewer. The performance gains for small or medium files may only be milliseconds or microseconds, but it can add up for larger files.

Sped up loading of the dashboard.

The dashboard made many more SQL queries than were necessary. Much of the information (such as a submitter’s information) was queried per-row instead of once per submitter, and some columns performed their own SQL queries per-row. This has now been greatly optimized and sped up to use the minimum number of SQL queries needed for all the information displayed.