Review Board 6 beta 2 builds upon the new review and extension functionality in Review Board 6 beta 1 to bring better diff navigation, self-review of draft diffs and files, improved SAML support, and even more extension options.
Better Diff Navigation
When viewing diffs, the file you’re currently looking at is now shown in the Review Banner at the top of the page. This helps you keep track of where you are in the review process.
You can also use this to quickly jump to any other file in the diff.
Use the colored dots to get a sense of the inserted, deleted, and replaced sections of the file, and to quickly jump to them.
Self-Review of Drafts
It’s now easier than ever to leave notes on your diffs for others, or to practice effective self-review.
Before publishing your change, you can now comment on your draft diffs and files, helping give other reviewers a heads up about how the code works or what problems you’ve already spotted that they can ignore.
Simply comment like normal, and then click Publish All to publish your draft change and comments all at the same time.
Improved SAML Single Sign-On
Review Board 5 introduced Single Sign-On with SAML, and Review Board 6 is giving you more options to better integrate with your Identity Provider.
Now, administrators can better link up user accounts by configuring the NameID format and user attribute names to match what your Identity Provider expects.
New Extension Features
We’ve added two new extension hooks to help you customize your Review Board and to build new features:
- HideActionHook helps Python extensions hide built-in actions (like “Ship It!”), making it easier to replace them with your own custom actions.
- FileAttachmentThumbnailContainerHook gives JavaScript extensions the ability to add new items to the file attachment thumbnail menu.
We’ve also added support for using pytest to unit test your extensions with rbext test. Simply run rbext test --pytest. This will become the default in Review Board 7.
Plus…
- Multiple tabs/windows showing the same review request will reload when publishing or discarding a review in one.
- We’ve made several usability improvements to the new Review Banner and the Review Dialog.
- We’ve improved API performance across the board with better caching logic.
There’s more in the works for Review Board 6, including better self-signed SSL/TLS certificate management for repositories, LDAP, and Active Directory.
We expect the next beta to be the last. If you’d like to help us test, please reach out with your feedback! You can use the beta 2 Docker image to get you started. Betas are also covered under an active support contract.
See the release notes for the full list of changes.