Review Board 7.0 Release Notes¶

Dark Mode (experimental)¶

Review Board 7 comes with an experimental Dark Mode. Users can choose in their profile settings whether to use Light Mode (the default), Dark Mode, or to follow the system theme (which can often be configured to change based on the time of day).

Binary Files in Diffs¶

Review Board now supports displaying, reviewing, and diffing certain types of binary files included as part of your code diffs.

At the moment, this is limited to image files but support for additional file types are in the works.

This requires posting your changes with RBTools 5.0+, and is supported for a limited set of version control systems:

• Git

• Mercurial

• Perforce

• Subversion

Support for a wider variety of file types and version control systems is coming in future versions. If there’s something in particular that you would like to see, please let us know.

Diff Viewer¶

• Diffs can now be reviewed on mobile devices.

  The diff viewer has been updated with a new responsive mode when viewing on mobile devices. This will change the display from the two-column view into a single column for content. This makes it much easier to read and interact with diffs on phones and other mobile devices.

• Added touchscreen support for the revision selector.

• Added commit information to the hint for comments on other revisions.

  When a draft review contains comments on multiple revisions of the diff, the diff viewer will show a hint listing all the revisions that the draft comments are present on. This previously did not include information about comments on commit ranges.

Integrations¶

• Integration with Microsoft Teams

  Microsoft Teams is a team collaboration application, offering workspace chat.

  Review Board can integrate with Microsoft Teams to post notifications whenever review requests and reviews are published. You can have multiple different Microsoft Teams configurations to deliver notifications to different channels (or even different teams).

  

• Updated compatibility for slash normalization in newer versions of Jenkins.

  For a while, Jenkins disallowed using slashes in job names, and required normalizing them to underscores. In newer versions, slashes are required.

  The Jenkins integration now provides separate template variables for {branch_name} and {noslash_branch_name}, and for {repository_name} and {noslash_repository_name}.

  Existing configurations may require manual changes, as slashes appearing in a job name outside of a variable are no longer converted to underscores.

• Added guided help to the CircleCI and Jenkins configuration forms.

• Added configurable timeouts to all CI integration backends.

  If a build on CircleCI, Jenkins, or Travis CI failed without notifying Review Board, the status update would just show that it was waiting forever. These integrations now allow you to specify an optional timeout value, after which the build will be marked as failed and allow users to trigger a retry.

Extensions¶

• Added a new --pytest argument to rbext test.

  This flag allows opting in to the Pytest-based test runner instead of nose.

• Extensions can now be built using modern TypeScript, JavaScript, and CSS tools.

  Review Board 7 includes a new static media building framework that makes it easier to consume Review Board’s JavaScript and CSS, as well as build the front-end part of extensions using modern frameworks.

  reviewboard.extensions.packaging will now set up symbolic links to the Review Board and Djblets source trees inside of .npm-workspaces, as well as create basic configurations for Babel, Rollup, and TSC (the TypeScript compiler).

Security Middleware¶

The Django Security Middleware has been added to the default middleware.

By default, we have set this up to set the X-Content-Type-Options header to nosniff. Review Board was not vulnerable to this particular problem, but having the header can make some security scanning software less noisy. This middleware also allows configuring many other policies such as HSTS, referrer policies, and cross origin opener policies.

The settings to enable these and set specific policies can be added to your settings_local.py file. The particular values for these settings will depend on your deployment and environment, so we have not enabled any of them by default. See the Django documentation on the security middleware for details.

clean-orphaned-data management command¶

Two bugs in prior versions of Review Board could potentially allow data to remain in the database in an orphaned state after certain delete or discard actions.

A new management command has been added that can delete this data, saving a bit of space in the database and filesystem.

To run the command, type:

$ rb-site manage /path/to/sitedir clean-orphaned-data [<options>]

General¶

• Fixed a visual glitch with the page background when content did not occupy the full viewport.

• Fixed various thread safety bugs in the Review Board server.

  Review Board is built with several internal “registries” to keep track of things like version control systems, authentication backends, and many other things. These would occasionally hit problems when running in deployments where the web server runs with multiple threads, causing errors to spew into logs, and occasionally to have missing or duplicate items. These thread safety bugs have been fixed.

Dashboard¶

• Fixed dashboard display in locales that use commas for decimal places.

  Datagrid columns which specify widths (specifically columns which expand to fill the available space) would display incorrectly in locales such as German which use commas for decimals instead of periods. This has been fixed.

• Added some additional default columns to the All Review Requests datagrid.

  The All Review Requests page was missing a couple important columns. The Ship It/Issue Counts and New Updates columns have been added to the default configuration.

  Existing users who have configured their columns for this page will need to add these manually if they want them.

• Fixed dashboard errors when URLs contained invalid sort query data.

  For public-facing servers, some web crawlers would assemble URLs with invalid sort querystrings, which was causing error e-mails to be sent to the admin. These will now report an error back to the client but not fail in a way that triggers emails or crash logs.

Review Requests¶

• Fixed to delete all appropriate data when permanently deleting review requests or discarding drafts and unpublished review requests.

  When a review request is posted with a diff, and then discarded without ever being published, some data could remain in the database.

  Similarly, permanently deleting a review request could leave various pieces of data in the database or in file storage. Review Board is primarily designed to never delete data, and only administrators had the ability to delete review requests entirely.

  See rb-site manage clean-orphaned-data for information on how to clean up orphaned data from existing systems.

• Fixed errors when attempting to use Update Diff on a review request that includes commit history.

  When posting a change using RBTools with either Git or Mercurial, the review request will keep track of all the commits included in your change. This allows you to see the individual commits that are part of each diff revision. Updating the diff for these requires using RBTools again.

  Previously, attempting to use the Update Diff UI and uploading a diff file would cause an error. Now this UI will show a message indicating that the Review Request is tracking commit history and give instructions for updating via RBTools.

Diff Viewer¶

• Fixed scrolling to anchors in the diff viewer.

  Links to particular locations in the diff viewer (such as a link to a particular file/line, or clicking a link from a comment to the Reviews tab to jump to that comment in the diff viewer) were not working correctly. These have been fixed to scroll to the relevant line as soon as the file in question is loaded.

Reviews¶

• Prevented empty reviews from being published.

  The new review banner in Review Board 6 made it easier to accidentally publish empty reviews. This has been fixed.

• Fixed links for comments made on commit ranges.

  When a comment was made on a specific range of commits or an individual commit within a diff, the link from that comment back to the diff viewer would not load the correct commit revisions. This has been fixed.

• Fixed comment flags shown on the diff viewer line numbers when viewing a commit range with comments.

  When viewing a range of commits in the diff viewer, flags for comments corresponding to that commit range were not correctly shown on the files in the diff.

• Fixed an issue where the diff excerpt shown for comments on commit ranges could sometimes display using the wrong tip commit, showing a different diff from the one the commenter was looking at when they made the comment.

• Fixed a bug with the Issue Summary Table where comments of different types that happened to have the same database ID could cause web browser caching conflicts.

• Fixed expanding collapsed reviews when clicking links to them.

  When clicking a link to a review, the page would scroll to it but if the review was collapsed, it would not get expanded. These links will now scroll to the correct place and expand the review box.

File Attachments¶

• Review UIs now display an error if attempting to show a diff between two revisions of a file where the two revisions do not have the same file type.

• Fixed a case where showing a diff between two revisions of an image attachment could load the page with the two sides having different zoom levels.

• Added text/markdown as a supported MIME type for the Markdown Review UI.

  Most systems used to use text/x-markdown as the MIME type for Markdown files, but many are starting to change this. Files uploaded by browsers with a text/markdown type will now be reviewable.

• Added a dedicated URL for file attachment downloads.

  When using a file storage backend that expires URLs (such as Amazon S3), Review Board could end up caching URLs for assets that expire before the user views them. Review Board will now create a stable URL that can regenerate the storage URL when necessary.

New Review Request¶

• Fixed problems with the “New Review Request” UI when uploading diff files using version control systems other than Git. (Bug #5013)

  On some version control systems, after providing a diff file, Review Board was supposed to prompt for more information (such as the base directory path between the root of the repository and the directory the diff was created from). This was showing a blank screen instead of prompting for this information.

My Account¶

• Fixed a bug where Gravatar-based avatar settings were failing to save because of a problem with the form.

Authentication¶

• Fixed redirect loops when logging in.

  When attempting to log in from the log-out page, a redirect loop could cause the user to get logged out again immediately after logging in.

E-mail Notifications¶

• Fixed a bug where files in diffs were sometimes listed twice.

Local Sites¶

• Fixed URLs for batch operations when using a Local Site.

Administration¶

• Fixed batch actions (such as delete) for items in the admin database pages.

• Fixed invisible links to file attachments without captions set in Admin UI -> Database -> File Attachments.

• Fixed incorrect form validation errors when switching search backends.

• Fixed visual glitches with text alignment in the Server Cache dashboard widget.

• Fixed word-wrapping issues with names in the Repositories dashboard widget.

• Fixed multiple tooltips showing up when mousing over data points in the Server Activity dashboard widget.

• Increased the maximum length of the URL field for WebHook targets.

  The default length for URLs was 200 characters, but some services which accept WebHook notifications create URLs longer than that. This limit has been increased to 512 characters.

• Fixed Travis CI configuration UI to properly limit repositories to GitHub.

  Travis CI only works with GitHub repositories. A regression had made it so the configuration UI would allow administrators to select non-GitHub repositories, which would then fail to run.

Integrations¶

• The Discord Discord integration has been updated to truncate long field values in messages in order to avoid hitting character length limits with the Discord server.

• Fixed links in chat integrations for review replies.

  Notifications sent to chat services for replies to reviews were linking to the correct page, but would not scroll to the relevant reply.

Docker¶

• Fixed bugs with installing Perforce in the Docker image.

• Fixed bundling of LDAP support in Review Board docker images. (Bug #5023)

  Patch by Florian Miedniak.