Review Bot 2.0 Release Notes¶

Packaging Changes¶

Review Bot now uses a limited set of dependencies. In Review Bot 1.0, all Python-based tools would be automatically installed when installing the worker. In 2.0, the default installation does not include any tools as dependencies. The full set of Python tools can be installed by installing the all metapackage:

$ pip install reviewbot-worker[all]

Review Bot 2.0 includes support for running on Review Board 3.0 and 4.0, and Python 2.7 and 3.6-3.8.

New Tools¶

• doc8

  Support has been added for doc8, a tool to check Sphinx/docutils-based documentation.

  Patch by André Klitzing.

• pydocstyle

  Support for the pydocstyle checker for Python docstrings has been added.

  Patch by Iris Law.

New Features¶

• Drop open issues on previous revisions. (Bug #4709)

  One common complaint with Review Bot was that a tool could add many duplicate comments if a diff is being iterated on and the author does not go through and close out issues from previous reviews. Review Bot now allows tool configurations to automatically drop any open issues from previous runs of the same tool, keeping the open issue list clean and up to date.

  This requires Review Board 3.0.19 or 4.0.

  Patch by Joshua Cannon.

• Added manual trigger and retry for tools. (Bug #4649)

  Some tools may be expensive to run or infrequently needed. Review Bot now allows tool configurations to specify that they should be run manually instead of automatically. If this is set, the tool’s entry on the review request will include a “Run” button which can be triggered by any viewing user.

  With this, you can now also retry tools which have failed or timed out (usually due to some configuration or deployment issue).

  This requires Review Board 3.0.19 or 4.0.

  Based on work by Alex Klemenchuk.

• Tools can now add general comments.

  While not yet used by any existing tools, the Review Bot framework now allows tools to create general comments as part of their review.

  Patch by Ammar Akhtar.

• Added automatic syncing of Git and Mercurial repositories for full clones.

  Using tools which require a full clone of the repository required configuring that repository in the Review Bot worker’s config file. This was intended to allow segmentation of repositories on a worker-by-worker basis (a worker would not pick up a task if it didn’t have access to the given repository), but in the case where there’s a limited number of workers but a lot of configured repositories, it meant a lot of manual configuration which had to be changed any time a new repository was added.

  The worker now allows configuration of a list of Review Board servers along with optional API credentials. If this is set in the config file, the worker will automatically sync any necessary configured repositories from the server, rather than requiring them to be configured individually.

  See Automatically Fetch Repositories From Review Board for more details.

  Patch by André Klitzing.

Bugs Fixed¶

• Fixed use of hardlinks when cloning Git repositories.

  When using a tool that requires a full clone of a Git repository which is hosted on the same server as the Review Bot worker, Git would attempt to use hardlinks to save some space. Unfortunately, since the contents of /tmp are often stored in RAM, this could fail.

  Patch by Alex Klemenchuk.

• Fixed creation of directories when applying patches.

  When applying a patch for tools which use full clones, if the patch added new files in directories which did not already exist, it would fail. This has been fixed to create any needed directories first.

  Patch by Alex Klemenchuk.

Contributors¶

• Alex Klemenchuk

• Ammar Akhtar

• André Klitzing

• David Trowbridge

• Iris Law

• Joshua Cannon