Month: November 2020

RBTools 2.0: Ready for Review Board 4.0

Christian Hammond

RBTools 2.0 is out, bringing compatibility improvements and new features for all users. The biggest improvement is the support for Review Board 4.0’s upcoming multi-commit review requests.

Multi-Commit Review Requests

Review Board 4.0 beta 1 is coming in the next few weeks, and with RBTools 2.0, developers will be able to post a series of commits to a review request so that they can be reviewed individually or as one squashed change, depending on what the reviewer chooses to do.

Those changes can also be landed, preserving their history or squashing them back into a single commit.

To stay with the old behavior and squash the commits before posting to a review request, you can pass –squash to rbt post or rbt land (or set SQUASH_HISTORY = True or LAND_SQUASH = True, respectively, in .reviewboardrc).

This is available for both Git and Mercurial, and will require Review Board 4.0.

RBCommons users will receive multi-commit review request support in 2021.

Custom Certificate Authorities

If your Review Board server uses a self-signed certificate backed by an in-house Certificate Authority, you can now configure RBTools to recognize it through the --ca-certs, --client-key, and --client-cert options (or CA_CERTS, CLIENT_KEY, and CLIENT_CERT in .reviewboardrc).

Easier Repository Setup

rbt setup-repo has been redesigned to better help people configure their local repositories to connect to Review Board. It offers a more helpful guided setup, making it easier to find the right repository and generate your .reviewboardrc file.

Default Branches in Git

RBTools now understands the init.defaultBranch configuration for Git, helping you transition your primary branch from master to something like main.

Better Mercurial Integration

Compatibility issues are fixed, repository detection is faster, and custom scripts can benefit from performance improvements by connecting RBTools to the Mercurial command server.

And Better Perforce Integration

RBTools can work with a wider mix of configurations utilizing SSL and brokers.

There’s also a new reviewboard.repository_name Perforce counter that can tie a depot to a Review Board repository, which can be used if .reviewboardrc isn’t an option.

Plus…

  • Variety of improvements for Python 3 compatibility (including support for Python 3.9).
  • Additional Git arguments for fine-tuning rename detection.
  • Custom formatting for rbt status, which is useful for scripting.
  • rbt land and rbt patch now accept a review request URL, instead of just an ID.
  • rbt patch can print a patch from a review request without needing a local copy of the repository.

See the release notes for more information, or download RBTools 2.0 today.

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New Release: Django Evolution 2.1

Christian Hammond

Just a few months ago, we released Django Evolution 2.0, the first release to support database upgrades using both Django’s migrations and our own evolutions.

Django Evolution 2.1 builds on this by introducing enhanced dependency management for evolutions and migrations. Now, an evolution (or its app) can specify other evolutions or migrations that must be applied either before or after.

Django applications that make use of swappable models can benefit from this, as an evolution defining that model can now be applied before a migration that requires it.

See the guide on adding dependencies to learn more.

Other highlights include:

  • Compatibility with Python 3.9
  • Workarounds for MySQL/MariaDB bugs in Django 1.8 through 1.10
  • Enhanced transaction management, providing safer upgrades and recovery in the event that something goes wrong

See the release notes for the complete list of changes.

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