Review Board 2.5.7 Release Notes¶

Added DMARC-compatibility when sending e-mails. (Bug #4458)

Review Board tries to send e-mail on behalf of users, in order to allow e-mail threads to more closely mirror the discussions happening in Review Board. While this generally works (particularly inside of organizations with their own e-mail infrastructure), it can cause problems when using Sender Verification through Sender Policy Framework and DMARC.

Now, Review Board looks up whether a DMARC rule may prevent our e-mails from being received by a user (when sending on behalf of the user), and switches instead to sending e-mail from the server’s address, formatting the name to be clear it’s sent on behalf of a user.

This should solve most e-mail sending problems that some organizations have hit.

Added a “Show Changes” link to review request e-mails. (Bug #4160)

This link points to the interdiff showing what changed since the previous update, making it easier for reviewers paying attention to e-mails to quickly see what changed.

Patch by Griffin Myers.

Improved matching of files in interdiffs.

Depending on the type of repository, complex changes to files in interdiffs could result in those files appearing mismatched in some way. For example, if a file is deleted in one revision, and a different revision shows the same file as deleted alongside a new file added with the same name (which is permitted by Subversion). Or if several files were moved/copied from the same source file. These cases would appear incorrectly, with files being shown as new file entries. This made reviews more difficult.

The algorithm has been greatly improved in this release. It now does a better job of handling these more specialized cases, resulting in a far more useful and informative interdiff view.

Added a new user selector for administration pages.

On very large installs with thousands of users, any administration page that allows for user selection (such as the group or repository configuration pages) could stall when trying to load and render all the users.

We now use a new user selector widget, which provides a smarter, faster way of finding and adding users. It shows the list of currently selected users, and offers search for quickly finding new users to add, along with showing detailed information and avatars for those users.

In the future, we will be including variations on this widget for other lists of items, such as review groups and repositories.

Added helpful information when failing to set up a GitHub organization-backed repository.

GitHub organizations can be set up (and usually are, these days) to require confirmation from an organization administrator before linking up a service. On these setups, adding the repository would just fail, claiming the repository didn’t exist. We now include some helpful information in this case, along with a link to a guide on linking the repository.

This is more of a problem on RBCommons than standalone Review Board servers.

Added the ability to edit hosting service account credentials for repositories.

Credentails for repositories tied to hosting services can now be modified by clicking Edit Credentials next to the configured account. This is useful when your password or token has changed on the service, and you need to update Review Board to use it.

Review Board settings can now only be modified by full administrators, not “staff” users.

While not commonly done, it’s possible to grant non-administrative users certain privileges in the administration UI, so that they can manage (for example) review groups or default reviewers. These are known in the Django world as “staff” users.

Those users ended up having access to the Review Board settings. Now, those settings can only be viewed and modified by full administrators (“superusers”).

Added organization of the settings forms for Active Directory, LDAP, and standard registration.

This should help guide people toward configuring these authentication methods, instead of lumping all standard and advanced settings together.

Added a new command line tool for running unit tests for custom extensions.

We’ve added a brand new command line tool, rbext, which extension authors can use to easily run unit tests shipped with their extensions, helping ensure their extensions run as expected.

See the guide on Testing Extensions for information on how to write and run unit tests for your extension.

Fixed crashes based on a user profile’s extra_data being null.

Review Board and third-party extensions can store data in a user profile’s extra_data field, but for many users this field can be null (as opposed to just empty). This led to crashes. Now, it’s guaranteed to be non-null.

Hitting enter in the search field for groups in the My Account page no longer incorrectly submits the form. (Bug #4452)

Fixed some small styling issues for login/registration pages on mobile.

Fixed the link on the Submitter column entries on Local Sites.

This regressed in 2.5, and was linking to the main (non-Local Site) page for a user.

Fixed starring review requests on the dashboard immediately after adding the Starred column. (Bug #4460)

Fixed a breakage in the columns menu when attempting to toggle it opened and closed really fast.

Fixed a breakage in opening the columns menu after reordering columns or waiting for the dashboard to reload. (Bug #4461)

Review requests created from existing commits now correctly store information on the draft.

Previously, creating a new review request from an existing commit in the New Review Request page would cause the review request to be created with all the information populated but without a draft. This forced the user to make a change before it could be published, in some cases.

Fixed several issues with custom Markdown-enabled text fields provided by extensions. (Bug #3963, Bug #4110)

A custom text field’s Markdown/plain text state wasn’t transferring from a draft to a review request when publishing the draft. There was also a related problem where the “Enable Markdown” checkbox wasn’t always being set correctly.

These issues have all been fixed.

Many users hit these issues when using the Note to Reviewers extension. You will not need to upgrade the extension in order to get these fixes.

Patch by Griffin Myers.

Fixed issues displaying and linking to bugs in the Bugs field on a review request when using Local Sites.

Fixed the cursor when hovering over part of a text field not containing text.

Hovering over a section of Markdown-capable text fields without text would show the standard arrow cursor. Now it shows the text cursor.

Fixed display of a Bugzilla bug’s summary and status when hovering over the bug ID. (Bug #4420)

Previously, the summary and status were being shown as Python tuples (in the form of ("my summary",).

Removed excess whitespace below the Reply buttons on reviews.

Fixed stale information needed by Review Bot (and possibly other extensions) when publishing a review request.

Review Bot, and other extensions listening to publish events, could end up seeing some older information when a review request is published (such as an older diff revision), causing them to fail or behave incorrectly.

Removed unwanted padding around lines in rendered Markdown files.

Fixed issues displaying some thumbnails in the “Review request changed” boxes.

PDF thumbnails (when using Power Pack) would fail to display correctly, due to a missing variable.

There were also issues providing the right data for older file attachments that didn’t have revision history set up.

Fixed administrators not being able to edit draft file attachments from other users.

While not intended for normal use, administrators have the ability to make changes to another user’s review requests. This change fixes their ability to edit the draft of an uploaded file attachment.

Note that administrators still won’t see those changes or see a draft banner after reloading the review request.

Fixed displaying the titles/captions on images when hovering over them for image reviews.

Fixed breakages with commenting on legacy (Review Board 1.0.x-1.5.x) screenshots.

Screenshots were a feature that pre-dated file attachments, and were specific to image files. File attachments replaced these in Review Board 1.6. However, older review requests may still have screenshots attached, and commenting on these have been broken until now.

Fixed the line range indicators in text-only e-mails.

The line range indicators introduced in 2.5, designed to show what lines of a file a comment applied to, only took into account the patched/modified lines (not the original lines), which wasn’t always useful. It also sometimes displayed the wrong lines, and sometimes crashed the page.

This feature has been completely reworked to be consistent with what reviews would show.

The “Diff” section in review request e-mails are no longer shown for review requests without diffs.

Patch by Griffin Myers.

The “View Diff” link in e-mails now points to the specific version of the diff posted, rather than the latest.

Patch by Griffin Myers.

Thumbnails shown for image diffs in e-mails will now load properly.

Fixed a bug that could cause bad passwords to be associated with repositories when configuring using a hosting service.

Some browsers would try auto-filling the hidden password field, causing a bad password to be saved. This was still saved as encrypted with the same security as other repository passwords, but its presence would interfere with the hosting service’s configured password. These passwords are no longer saved. On site upgrade, these passwords will be removed from repositories.

Fixed storing repository passwords containing non-ASCII characters.

The General Settings page no longer crashes if cache server information is missing from settings.

Fixed the signatures generated for WebHook payloads to use SHA-1. (Bug #4412)

Our documentation states that the payloads are signed using SHA-1 hashes for HMAC, but the implementation was actually using MD5. It’s now properly using SHA-1.

This may affect some endpoints that were verifying using MD5.

Fixed dispatching WebHooks configured on Local Sites.

Fixed UI issues in the WebHook configuration form.

Repositories are now shown in a standard side-by-side view, and the main information for a WebHook is now shown in a “General Information” section.

Fixed display issues when listing configured WebHooks.

The displayed name of the WebHook was overly verbose. We now show the URL instead.

Fixed page breakages when WebHooks failed to send or when using a custom payload with bad content.

A configured WebHook that was in some way problematic could end up breaking the page when, for example, publishing a review request or a review. Breakages are now logged, and no longer result in crashing.

Fixed failures with race conditions when migrating diffs.

When attempting to migrate diffs to the new compressed storage method (using the condensediffs command, for example, or when viewing an unmigrated diff), it was possible to hit a race condition where that particular diff had just been migrated by another caller.

In these cases, the migration process will now recover and finish any migration tasks that still need to be done.

Fixed breakages when posting existing commits for review in the New Review Request page.

Fixed the error shown when Bitbucket repositories couldn’t be added.

Previously, we would end up showing a File Not Found error when adding an invalid repository. Now we properly say that the repository couldn’t be found.

Fixed issues with certain variations of CVSROOTs. (Bug #4022)

We supported common types of CVSROOTs, such as :pserver: or similar, but had issues with :ext:, :local:, :fork:, and other less common variants. Diff filenames wouldn’t parse correctly, breaking syntax highlighting and causing the files to show up as moved.

Fixed a crash when attempting to log data for GitLab repositories.

Patch by Mariusz Dubielecki.