Review Board 4.0 Beta 1 Release Notes¶

Release date: December 16, 2020

Review Board 4.0 beta 1 is the first release to support Python 3 (versions 3.6 through 3.9), and the 4.x series will be the last to support Python 2.7.

If you’re giving this a try, we recommend installing using a recent version of Python 3.

This release contains all bug fixes and features from Review Board version 3.0.19.

Installation¶

To install this release, run the following:

$ sudo pip install \
    --trusted-host downloads.reviewboard.org \
    -f http://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/ReviewBoard/4.0/ \
    -f http://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/rbintegrations/2.0/ \
    --pre -U ReviewBoard

Or:

$ sudo easy_install \
    -f http://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/ReviewBoard/4.0/ \
    -f http://downloads.reviewboard.org/releases/rbintegrations/2.0/ \
    -U ReviewBoard

Note

If this is a new install, please use pip, as support for easy_install is going away.

Warning

We do not recommend upgrading a production server with this version of Review Board. It’s best to install on a test server, with a copy of your production database, in case there are any major problems.

Upgrade Notes¶

This release contains database schema changes to the following tables:
- diffviewer_diffset
- diffviewer_filediff
This will take some time to migrate the database, particularly on large installs. Please test the upgrade on a copy of your database first, to ensure the upgrade is smooth and to time how long the upgrade takes.

Important

Do not cancel the upgrade on a production system for any reason.
We have a new process for applying database upgrades.

This should be mostly behind-the-scenes, but please let us know if you hit any issues with upgrading.

Your conf/reviewboard.wsgi (or custom WSGI script) might need to be updated!

rb-site upgrade will try to update this automatically, but you might need to make the changes yourself if your setup is more specialized:

# If you see these lines:
import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

# Change them to:
from django.core.wsgi import get_wsgi_application
application = get_wsgi_application()

Packaging¶

Review Board 4.0 supports Python 2.7 and 3.6-3.9.
Django 1.11.x is required.
Djblets 2.0 is required.
django_evolution 2.x (2.1 or higher) is required.
django-haystack 2.x (2.7 or higher) is required.
markdown 3.1.x (3.3.1 or higher) is required on Python 2.7, and 3.3.3 or higher on Python 3.
pymdown-extensions 6.x (6.2 or higher) is required on Python 2.7, and 6.x (6.3 or higher) on Python 3.
Pygments 2.1 or higher is required (2.5.x is the latest supported version on Python 2.7).

New Features¶

Multi-Commit Review Requests¶

Review Board was first created in an era of centralized revision control, where a single patch corresponded to a single commit. Since then, the world has moved on, and it’s not uncommon to develop on branches where multiple commits all contribute to a single development task. While it was possible to review these in various ways using RBTools to post either ranges or individual commits, it wasn’t the ideal experience.

We’re proud to introduce true multi-commit support for Review Board. Each revision of the diff in a Review Request can now contain multiple commits which can be viewed and commented on, either individually or in ranges.

This is supported for Git and Mercurial repositories, and requires RBTools 2.0 or higher to post the changes.

Installation and Setup¶

Better guidance for site creation.

When installing a new Review Board site, rb-site now uses visual hints (colors and improved layout of text) to help you through your installation.

You can disable color by passing --no-color.
Simpler installation of optional Python dependencies.

Installation of optional dependencies has been simplified. The following Python support modules can now be installed through pip:
- Mercurial: pip install -U ReviewBoard[mercurial]
- Postgres: pip install -U ReviewBoard[postgres]
- Subvertpy: pip install -U ReviewBoard[subvertpy]
- MySQL: pip install -U ReviewBoard[mysql]
- Perforce: pip install -U ReviewBoard[p4]
- LDAP: pip install -U ReviewBoard[ldap]
- S3 File Storage: pip install -U ReviewBoard[s3]
- OpenStack Swift File Storage: pip install -U ReviewBoard[swift]

New Integrations¶

Discord

Discord is a chat system similar to Slack, but with a focus on communities, from open source to gaming to general discussions.

Review Board can now post to Discord when review requests are posted or updated, or whenever there’s new discussions on the review request.

See the documentation for configuration instructions.

Patch by Hailan Xu.
Jenkins

Jenkins is a widely-used continuous integration, deployment, and automation service. It’s open source, self-hosted, and extensible with plugin support.

This integration works along with a Review Board plugin for Jenkins to trigger builds when a review request is posted or updated.

See the documentation for configuration instructions.

Patches by James Shephard and Marcus Boay.

User Features¶

Added an “Overview” section in the Dashboard (Bug #750).

Until now, the dashboard has has Outgoing and Incoming sections, which list the review requests owned by a user and the review requests assigned to a user (directly or as part of a group), respectively.

The new Overview section can be thought of as a union of those two, showing all open incoming and outgoing review requests.

Patch by Bolarinwa Balogun.
Quickly archive review requests by clicking on the inbox icon.

The inbox icon in the actions bar of a review request shows a menu containing Archive and Mute options. It’s often annoying to wait for that menu to apper, so clicking on the icon itself will now trigger the archive/unarchive action.

Patch by Malcolm Gomes.
Added “Publish and Archive” to the review dialog and banner.

It’s common to immediately archive a review request after publishing a review. The drop-down on the Publish button in the review dialog and banner now includes an option to publish and archive the review request with a single click.

Patch by Guilia Mattia.
Added live thumbnails for video files.

Hovering over a video file will now load the video and play a short segment of it, to give you a sense of the content.

Administration Features¶

Introducing a new administration UI.

We’ve rewritten the administration UI to provide a cleaner look with a focus on mobile support. This fits in better with the general look and field of Review Board, and shares many of the components found throughout the rest of the product.

Navigation is no longer split between a sidebar and a banner at the top. You now navigate solely through the sidebar. On mobile, navigation appears in the standard mobile menu.
Read-only mode.

Administrators can now put the site into read-only mode, which will be shown to all users accessing Review Board. This is intended for use when performing maintenance or upgrades on the server, preventing users from submitting data which might be lost during the process.

This does not prevent all writes to the database (administrators can still make changes), but provides a good mechanism for preventing users from losing their work.

Patch by Kanghee Park.
Added new smarter object selectors for repositories and groups.

Review Board 2.5.7 introduced a new selector for choosing users which avoided some of the performance issues that could arise with the default Django related-object selectors. This new selector UI is now also used for choosing related groups and repositories.

Patch by Storm Kaefer.

Performance Improvements¶

Added hints to avoid search bot indexing for many links.

If your server is public, you likely have search engine bots constantly crawling every review request, diff revision, interdiff range, and page of results in the dashboard, which can slow down a server.

To avoid that, we’ve added rel="nofollow" attributes to many links throughout the web UI.

Web API¶

Added new APIs and fields for multi-commit review requests:
- Validate Diff Commit List Resource
- Diff Commit Resource
- created_with_history field on Review Request Resource payloads
- create_with_history field when creating a Review Request Resource
- commit_count field on Diff Resource payloads
Review Resource now accepts a publish_and_archive boolean field to archive the review after publish.
Repository Resource can now filter repositories that start with a particular prefix by passing ?q=... in the request.
Fixed HTTP 500 Internal Server Error errors from Review General Comment Resource when the user did not have access permissions.

Extensions¶

Note

Extensions must be updated to support Django 1.11 and Python 3!

This may require a lot of work on your part, depending on the complexity of your extension. See our guide on upgrading to Django 1.11 for help, or reach out to us for support.

Added new standard CSS classes for forms, buttons, spinners, sidebars, and more.

You can make use of these in your own code to help your extension better fit in with Review Board.

We don’t have any HTML documentation for this at this point, but you can find in-code documentation for the following:
Added new template blocks for defining extension-provided page classes, attributes, and options.

Custom pages created by extensions should now override the following blocks:
- js-page-view-type: The name of the JavaScript RB.PageView() subclass managing the page’s rendering.
- js-page-view-options: Options to pass to the RB.PageView() subclass’s options parameter.
- js-page-model-type: The name of the JavaScript RB.Page() subclass managing the page’s state.
- js-page-model-options: Options to pass to the RB.PageView() subclass’s options parameter.
- js-page-model-attrs: Attributes to set on the RB.Page(). subclass.

Extensions can define global variables for templates in a new global-vars template block.

This allows you to define a variable once in a common place and use it in any other template block. For example:

{% load djblets_utils %}

{% block global-vars %}
{%  definevar "my_variable" %}value...{% enddefinevar %}
{% endblock global-vars %}

{% block content %}
{{my_variable}}
{% endblock %}

Custom JavaScript can now access RB.Product() to determine the Review Board version, release status, and manual URL.

Bug Fixes¶

Dashboard¶

Fixed HTTP 404 Not Found errors when changing datagrid filters (Bug #4653).

If the dashboard filters were changed while viewing a page other than the first (for example, going from archived review requests being shown to being hidden), the new total number of results may not have as many pages. This could result in the display of a 404 page instead of the results. The datagrid will now reset to viewing the first page when changing filters.

Patch by Mandeep Singh.

Diff Viewer¶

Rewrote the interdiff algorithm to address numerous edge cases.

Review Board 3.x users on occasion noticed problems with missing lines in interdiffs, due to some bad assumptions made by the old algorithm. We’ve rewritten the algorithm to correct these.

Please give this a test and report any interdiff issues to us, so that we can correct them before 4.0 is released.

Review Requests¶

Fixed creating draft review requests when using Update > Add Files (Bug #4760).

Using drag-and-drop to attach a file attachment to a review request without an active draft would correctly create a draft, but this was not happening correctly when using the Add File action.

Patch by Sarah Hoven.

Review UIs¶

Added application/x-javascript matching for the text Review UI.

Many browsers are now referring to JavaScript files using the application/x-javascript MIME type (rather than the traditional text/javascript). This was preventing JavaScript file attachments from being reviewable.
Tightened up MIME type matching to prevent over-eager assignment of Review UIs.

Different user interfaces for file review are assigned based on MIME type, but the matching was too loose, especially for types starting in application/. This could result in the wrong review UI being shown (for example, a text file UI shown for a PDF attachment).

Administration¶

Fixed handling of error conditions in the loaddb management command (Bug #4629).

Patch by Jeremie Corriveau.

Contributors¶

This is a big release, with improvements, bug fixes, and polish from a large number of contributors. Thank you for all your work on 4.0!

Adil Malik
André Klitzing
Beth Rennie
Bolarinwa Balogun
Christian Hammond
David Trowbridge
Giulia Mattia
Griffin Myers
Hailan Xu
Hannah Lin
James Shephard
Jeremie Corriveau
Kanghee Park
Malcolm Gomes
Mandeep Singh
Marcus Boay
Mike Conley
Nicole Hagerman
Ruonan Jia
Sarah Hoven
Storm Kaefer
Xiaohui Liu