Welcome back, everyone! We’re here with another ChangeLog, this time focusing on a couple things that just wrapped up: This semester’s student projects, and a series of behind-the-scenes repository configuration improvements.
End of a Semester
Last month, we talked a bit about the CANOSP student program run out of the University of Alberta, and showed off some of the work our CANOSP students have done on Review Board.
They’ve all been hard at work improving our Review UI support (custom review UIs for different types of file attachments), building up both the underlying capabilities of a Review UI and creating prototypes of new UIs for new types of files.
They’ve just wrapped up their semester and completed their final demo videos. We’d like to show off their hard work.
Nicole Hagerman
Nicole’s focus has been the underlying Review UI support, allowing Review UIs to be more dynamic and to not be limited to a single URL. This work has been a backbone of other student projects this semester, so we’re covering it first.
On top of this, she’s built a new Review UI for more easily viewing JSON files, both in their source form and in a structured tree-based form.
Adil Malik
Adil built a series of new Review UIs designed for reviewing:
- XML files, with options similar to the JSON file Review UI built by Nicole
- Jupyter Notebooks, a popular tool in the Python world
- Audio files, complete with waveforms and histograms, offering both diffing and commenting
These have come along really nicely, and show the power of our Review UI support (and the work done by Nicole Hagerman).
Ceegan Hale
Ceegan split his time between some improvements to our diff viewer and to our Review UIs as well:
- Improved the diff viewer’s display of minified files (e.g.,
.min.jsfiles) - Iterated on our in-progress support for showing Review UIs in the diff viewer
- Built a prototype Review UI for viewing archive file attachments (e.g.,
.zip,.rar, etc.).
Repository Configuration Improvements
A good chunk of my own time these past few weeks has been to rework the code behind the repository configuration page. Along with an assortment of bug fixes, we’re working to make it easier to configure plain (non-GitHub/Bitbucket/etc.) repositories.
Historically, plain repositories all shared the same set of configuration fields. You had your “Path” field, “Mirror Path,” “Username,” “Password”. A few had special fields like Perforce’s “Use ticket-based authentication,” but they were baked into the repository form and dealt with specially. Third-party repository support couldn’t add their own fields, and administrators had to translate concepts like a Git Clone URL into our concept of a “Path.”
As of the upcoming Review Board 3.0.16, each type of repository will be able to provide its own configuration form. For instance, down the road, Git repositories will have a dropdown for selecting CGit, GitWeb, etc. as the repository content access method, instead of forcing people to type in a cryptic URL.
Here’s a mockup:
Bottom line: It’s going to be easier to configure repositories in upcoming releases.
There’s a lot of under-the-hood work that’s been done to enable this, and that work is also going to lead to some future improvements we’re looking forward to building in the Review Board 5.0 timeframe. Can’t wait to write about it.
Wrapping Up
That’s another week done. We’ll be back next week!
So what do you think so far? Are the ChangeLogs interesting? Boring? Is there something else you want to hear about? Please let us know on the community forum so we can improve these going forward.
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