ChangeLog: January 23, 2020 — Student Sprint and Django Upgrade

What a week it’s been. We have two topics to go over: Last weekend’s student mentorship sprint, and a status update on the big Django upgrade.

The student sprint was great!

Last weekend was our student sprint for CANOSP, kindly hosted by the Startup Edmonton in Edmonton, Canada. There, we met up with our new students from the University of Alberta and University of British Columbia, and spent the weekend getting to know them, teaching them about Review Board and how we do things here, and letting them loose on projects.

We may have been sleepy most of the time (these start early!), and VERY cold (had to sit by a stack of ice cubes to keep warm), but everyone had a lot of fun, and have since been hard at work on their projects.

The main focuses for this semester are accessibility and usability. We’re working to make the product easier to use, improving keyboard navigation, and experimenting with ways to offer useful inline help. Much of this work is slated for Review Board 4.0.

Django upgrade time!

This week also marks the end of Django 1.6 in Review Board. We’ve been working for a long time on getting onto a newer version of Django, which has been a much more complex project for us than for most, and we’re finally ready to bump our Django requirement to 1.11.

For those paying attention, Django itself is at 3.0.2, but 1.11 is the last version to support Python 2.7. While Python 2.x is now end-of-life’d, that doesn’t mean it’s not in active use in enterprise, and frankly, many of our users are just not ready to upgrade. So Review Board 4.0 will continue to be providing compatibility for 2.7.

By the weekend, we should be on 1.11, and then we’ll be getting ready to test this in production. If all goes well, a beta will follow soon.

If you build extensions for Review Board, you’re going to need to make some changes to support Django 1.11. We have a bunch of useful information on Django updates on our wiki, which we’ll also include in the release notes. Make sure you give the beta a try and begin porting early.

We offer support contracts that cover development assistance, if you need it.

Back to work!

If you have any questions, or anything you’re curious about and want us to cover, please reach out on our community forum.

We’re also on Reddit (/r/reviewboard), Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (featuring student project videos!) if you want other ways to keep up with what we’re up to.