Review Board 1.7 Beta 1 Release Notes¶

Added a requirement for Django 1.4.

This is the first release to require Django 1.4. This release is not backwards-compatible with earlier versions of Django.

Dropped Python 2.4 support.

We no longer support Python 2.4 deployments. This is part of our effort to move to more modern versions of Python, in order to improve the codebase. It’s also a requirement that’s otherwise enforced on us by Django 1.4, for the same reasons.

Experimental extension support.

Review Board 1.7 has experimental support for custom extensions. These can augment the functionality of Review Board by providing new pages, custom operations when actions take place, new review UIs, new REST API, new review request actions, new administration UI widgets, and more.

Extensions have full access to the functions within Review Board, and can even provide their own database models for tracking data.

This is a very experimental feature. We welcome people to play with it, but note that it is very likely that your extension will break between releases, depending on which APIs you rely upon. We don’t intend for the entire Review Board codebase to be used as a stable API. We will in time document a stable API that can be relied upon.

There’s some in-progress documentation <http://www.reviewboard.org/wiki/Building_Extensions> available. This will later be moved into a developer’s guide.

This was the work of many developers and contributors. In particular, Mike Conley led a lot of the effort into getting this feature ready.

New administration UI.

The administration UI has been totally rewritten from the ground up. It’s now cleaner, provides more useful information at a glance, and is extensible. The general look now fits in with the look of Review Board.

The new UI consists of several widgets that flow onto the page. Each widget can describe a bit of information. The built-in widgets provide graphs of user activity, caching, and more.

Some of the main settings are also listed on the side, for quick reference.

Patch by Vlad Filippov.

Issue summary table for review requests.

The issue summary shows what issues have been filed on a review request, and their current states. Clicking on an issue will take you to the appropriate spot in the review.

The list of issues can be filtered by status (opened, resolved, etc.), or by the reviewer.

This makes it easy to see what still needs to be done when visiting a review request.

Patch by Yazan Medanat.

Moved files in a change are better represented in the diff viewer.

Diffs that contain moved or renamed files under certain supported SCMs are no longer shown as one deleted file and one added file. We now show that the file was moved, and even show any changes that may have been made alongside the move.

This is currently only supported for Git, but more SCMs will be supported in the future.

Patch by Dave Druska.

Some file attachments are now shown with more detailed previews.

We’ve begun work on better file attachment support. The first step of that allows us to render image files with a thumbnail of the image, and text files with a snippet of their text. These renderers are extensible through our new extension support.

Patch by Anthony Mok.

Added a “To Me” column in the dashboard.

The “To Me” column indicates whether a review request explicitly lists you as a reviewer. This helps prioritize what review requests to look at first.

Patch by Anthony Mok. (Bug #495)

Dates and times are now localized to the user’s region.

The default timezone in the database is now UTC, and users are able to set their own timezone in their preferences page. All dates and times will be shown relative to their timezone.

Patch by Dave Druska.

The review request update bubble now says if the review request was closed. Patch by Jim Chen.

E-mails now include the review request ID in the subject header.

This helps to identify a review request a bit faster, and makes it easier to refer to a review request by ID from just the e-mail.

Patch by Curtis Miller. (Bug #2271)

Links in the Description and Testing Done text now open in new windows or tabs. Patch by Jim Chen. (Bug #2074)

Required fields on a review request are now marked as required by showing an asterisk. Patch by Yazan Medanat.

Added a “Show changes” link on the change description boxes after publishing a diff. These will take you to an interdiff between the new diff and the previous version.

Patch by Curtis Miller.

Added support for the latest CVS diff file format.

The latest CVS diff file format appends version information to the filenames in the diffs. We now support this format if encountered.

Patch by Rodrigo Castro.

Reduced download time of JavaScript and CSS.

All JavaScript and CSS files are now combined and minified. This reduces the number of downloads and the total download time by a considerable amount, making for a faster experience on an empty cache.

Reduced diff storage and lookups.

Any new per-file diffs uploaded will only be stored once in the database, instead of per-upload. That is, if you upload two patches, and one of the per-file diffs hasn’t changed between the two, the diff will only be stored once in the database. This should reduce database sizes from here on out, but does not affect existing diffs.

Patch by Dave Druska.

Added server capabilities in /api/info/.

The /api/info/ resource now has a list of server capabilities in a capabilities dictionary. These are organized by categories, each of which has a dictionary of capabilities as values. See the documentation for an example.

This currently only contains one item, diffs.moved_files, which indicates whether the server supports moved file information in diffs.

Added resources for viewing the original and patched files for a FileDiff.

These are child resources of the FileDiff resource, and can be retrieved by following the original_file and patched_file links, when available.

The original file resource is not available for new files, and the patched file resource is not available for deleted files.

Patch by Steven MacLeod.

The “Diff Updated” column in the dashboard now actually reflects the last diff update.

Existing review requests will see blank values under the column until their next diff update.

Patch by Bogdana Popa. (Bug #1246)

Captions changes for file attachments are now shown on change description boxes, just like screenshot caption changes.

Patch by Bogdana Popa.