Review Board 1.0 Alpha 2 Release Notes¶

Release date: February 3, 2009

New Features¶

Load times for nearly all parts of Review Board have greatly increased. The browser is now instructed to aggressively cache media files and many pages, meaning fewer downloads when going to any particular page.

We optimize the order in which resources are loaded in order to take advantage of the browser’s ability to parallelize downloads of similar resources types (such as CSS files or JavaScript).

The results of these files are GZip’d to further increase transfer speeds.

Apache users will get these improvements for free. lighttpd users will need to upgrade their lighttpd config file based on the template provided with Review Board in the contrib/conf/ directory.

On top of this, we now use jQuery 1.3.1, which is many times faster than the previous version of jQuery we were using, and we also have a number of improvements such as progressive loading of the diff viewer.
Added progressive loading of the diff viewer. This is one of the main features of this release. Regardless of the size of the diff, the diff viewer now loads quickly, and loads each file’s diff progressively. This gives people the ability to review code before all the diffs have even been generated.

This also fixes some major scalability issues we’ve had with large diffs. In theory, it’s now possible to review very large diffs that span many pages.
Added support for linkifying pieces of text in the Description and Testing Done fields. (Bug #258)

The following formats are supported:
- URLs
- /r/123 numbers (even /r/123/diff and such)
- bug/issue numbers (in the form of bug abc123, bug #abc123, issue abc123 and issue #abc123)
Added support for Clearcase repositories. This depends on a mounted view on the Review Board server. Patch by Daniel Belz.

Feature Improvements¶

Improved lighttpd and Apache+fastcgi support. A Review Board install using either lighttpd or Apache+fastcgi should now work out of the box without setting up any custom scripts for launching fastcgi.
The diff fragments placeholders in the review request page are now set to the same size as the fragment itself. This means that progressively loaded fragments should no longer cause the page to jump nearly as much, resulting in a smoother loading experience.
When displaying the Review form, we now make sure that the form is scrolled to the top. This fixes a bug where the page was often scrolled to the bottom of the list of comments.
Several improvements were made to Bazaar support. We now use bzrlib and support revid information in the diff header.
The comment dialog is now slightly wider and has slightly smaller text, resulting in more room for comments.

Bugs Fixed in Review Board¶

Whitespace from usernames are now stripped on LDAP accounts, which prevents duplicate user accounts in the database. (Bug #728)
Fixed a bug where anchors in comment flags were incorrect and were getting lost when setting the comment count for the flag. This was breaking anchors to parts of the diff. (Bug #820)
The fields in the comment dialog are now disabled if the user is not logged in. (Bug #827)
Key presses in dialogs or in the review request details box no longer trigger navigation in the diff viewer. (Bug #828)
The “Review” link on a review request is no longer displayed if the user is not logged in.
Trailing whitespace wasn’t shown in diff fragments on the review request page.
Trailing whitespace wasn’t always shown in the diff viewer, if it appeared in the middle of a comment block.
Removed some old YUI files that were still in the repository.

Bugs Fixed in post-review¶

We now strip the filename coming in from Perforce. There can be a trailing newline sometimes, resulting in a failed upload. (Bug #726)
We set the correct locale now when invoking svn. Patch by Łukasz Jernaś. (Bug #822)
Fixed backwards version comparison logic in post-review’s GitClient. Patch by Stacey Sheldon.
Added support for hgsubversion. Patch by Augie Fackler
Added support for Clearcase. Patch by Daniel Belz.

Bugs Fixed in rb-site¶

rb-site now sets postgresql_psycopg2 as the DATABASE_ENGINE for PostgreSQL installs. Patch by Rusty Burchfield. (Bug #749)
rb-site should now generate config files that work correctly on Windows servers.