Announcements

A new stopwatch extension for Review Board

David Trowbridge

In any business setting, it’s nice to measure as many data points as possible in order to optimize processes. One common request we’ve had over the years has been the ability to know how much time people are spending on code reviews. This can be used to identify problems on both ends of the spectrum. If people are knocking out reviews in just a few seconds, they’re probably not giving the code the attention it needs to find the defects. Likewise, if code reviews are eating up too much time, it can point to problems of accumulated technical debt or the need for training or mentoring.

Stopwatch Extension

We’re working on a new extension that adds a “stopwatch” to the bottom-right of a review request. This can be toggled on and off, and the total time will be recorded in the review. This data is also available in the API for use by external tools, and we’ll be adding some nice reporting of this data to Power Pack.

Stopwatch Extension - Review header

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RBTools 0.7.3 is out, with Unicode fixes and more

Christian Hammond

Have you been plagued by Unicode errors when posting changes? Subversion 1.7.x compatibility problems? SSL errors with self-signed certs on Python 2.7.9+? Well then, today’s release of RBTools 0.7.3 is for you! … and, well, everyone, really. There’s a lot in here you’re going to want.

First off, the Unicode fixes. We had some Unicode-related breakages in past releases, which have been almost entirely eliminated in this release. If you’ve hit any such error before, give 0.7.3 a try.

There are lots of compatibility and behavioral improvements for Bazaar, ClearCase, CVS, Subversion, Perforce, Plastic, and TFS. Patching, for instance, works a lot more reliably across the board. Subversion 1.7.x and lower should start working again as well.

It’s not all bug fixes, though. We have some new features and command line options:

  • rbt post --stamp will auto-stamp commits with the review request URL.
  • rbt patch -R can be used to revert a patch from a review request.
  • rbt land and rbt stamp now work with Perforce.
  • Perforce supports changesets with imported files from remote depots.
  • API caching behavior and cookie storage can now be disabled/changed for any command. Useful for hooks and other scripts.
  • SSL certificate verification can be disabled on Python 2.7.9+ by using --disable-ssl-verification.

Those are the highlights! For the complete list of changes, see the release notes.

But wait, we have a couple more announcements concerning our releases:

Better installation through pip and Wheels

We’re now officially releasing Python Wheel packages for RBTools, supporting the latest versions of pip. To install RBTools, simply type:

$ pip install --allow-all-external RBTools

(In the future, we’re hoping to eliminate the need for --allow-all-external.)

Signed releases

As of this release, we’re now signing all builds with our official PGP key. Using gpg, you can verify a build was produced by us by importing our public key and then verifying it against the .asc signature files from our downloads.

For example, to verify RBTools-0.7.3.exe was produced by us, download it along with RBTools-0.7.3.exe.asc and run:

$ gpg2 --recv-key 4ED1F993
$ gpg2 --verify RBTools-0.7.3.exe.asc

(Note that if it complains about the key not being certified with a trusted signature, it’s just because you haven’t signed our key. If you see that message, and the primary key fingerprint is 09D5 06DA BB62 A09E 891D A9F3 2852 91B3 4ED1 F993, it’s good!)

We’ll have documentation covering this in more detail soon.

Thanks everyone, and as always, feel free to reach out with any questions.

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RBTools 0.7.2 is here!

Christian Hammond

It’s been just over a month since RBTools 0.7.1 arrived at stores near you (or probably not). That’s a whole month spent not upgrading RBTools, and we can’t have that. Plus, there were some good bug fixes and new commands we thought we’d send your way. So let’s not waste any more time. Here’s what’s in today’s release of RBTools 0.7.2.

We’ve fixed some issues working with Bitbucket/Beanstalk/Unfuddle. We’ve heard reports from users that posting changes against their Git repositories hosted on these services that just resulted in failure, so we’ve gone ahead and fixed that all up.

There are also two new RBTools commands for you to play with:

  • rbt login will log into RBCommons and store the cookie. rbt post and other commands will still do that, but it’s sometimes handy to have new users log in once in order to ensure they’re all set up properly.
  • rbt logout will log you out of your API session on RBCommons, and delete the cookie.

For the full list of changes, see our release notes.

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RBTools 0.7.1 is released

Christian Hammond

Today’s release of RBTools 0.7.1 fixes up several issues found in this month’s big 0.7 release, and helps to increase performance when posting changes for review. There are also compatibility fixes for Windows, and improvements to the new Windows installer.

Some of the highlights include:

  • Unicode compatibility fixes when running on Windows.
  • CVS/Subversion diffs are once again generated from the current directory and not the root of the checkout.
  • Several fixes for the Windows Installer.
  • Support for invoking RBTools in a Bash shell on Windows.
  • Fewer API requests are needed to post changes for review.

For the full list of changes, see the release notes.

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RBTools 0.7 is here!

Christian Hammond

RBTools 0.7 is packed with new tools and improvements for your workflow, making it faster to install, post changes to RBCommons, and land your changes.

There’s a lot here, so we’ll go into the major new additions.

Easy installation for Windows and MacOS X

We’ve improved the installation experience. If you’re on Windows or MacOS X, you can simply download the RBTools installer for your platform. In seconds, you’ll be ready to use the latest RBTools.

Land reviewed changes with one command

The all-new rbt land is the fastest way to take a change (in a local branch or a review request), validate that it’s been reviewed, and land it in your repository. It will format the commit message to include the review request’s description and testing information, and can even handle pushing the change upstream and deleting the local branch in one go.

(This is currently only available for Git repositories. Support for other repositories will come soon.)

Exclude files from review

Sometimes you’ll have modified files that you just don’t want up for review. Auto-generated code, for instance. You can now exclude these when posting changes for review by using the new -X option to rbt post, or by setting EXCLUDE_PATTERNS in .reviewboardrc.

Make your own commands with aliases

Ever find yourself repeating a group of options? rbt post -g yes -u HEAD, for instance? In 0.7, you can create an alias — a new RBTools command, basically — for those options.

You can even go a step further and make an alias that runs non-RBTools commands. Want to always run unit tests before posting code? Make an alias. How about merging the latest upstream changes into your branch before posting? There’s another alias!

See the documentation on aliases for more information.

Faster communication with RBCommons

We’ve sped up RBTools by caching results from RBCommons. This means lots of operations, such as posting changes, is faster than ever.

If you’re using the RBTools Python API to write your own integrations, you’ll benefit from this with no additional work on your end.

And lots more!

We haven’t even talked about rbt stamp, support for API tokens, or all the bug fixes and other feature improvements.

Check out the release notes for the whole list of changes.

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A new batch of feature and performance improvements

Christian Hammond

Tonight, we’ve released a huge set of bug fixes and feature improvements for RBCommons that should improve your code review experience.

Faster performance

We’ve fine-tuned many parts of RBCommons to give you a faster experience.

Editing Markdown text should now feel as fast as editing plain text. The lag that would sometimes appear has been fixed.

The dashboard now loads a lot faster when using the People, Groups, or To Me columns.

We’ve also improved performance in our API. RBTools and various operations on the site should be much faster now.

Markdown improvements

Markdown is now completely optional. By default, all text fields on review requests and comments on reviews will be in Markdown mode, as before. However, you’ll now be able to turn off Markdown while editing, saving as plain text.

You can also choose to disable Markdown by default for all fields in your My Account page. Simply uncheck “Always use Markdown for text fields.”

Note that if Markdown is enabled by default, then all fields will start off editing in Markdown mode. Any plain text will be escaped first.

Along with this, we’ve fixed a number of escaping and rendering problems with Markdown text, particularly for text coming from a commit.

Better clipboard support in the diff viewer

The diff viewer now supports selecting and copying the text within either column in the diff viewer, without that selection covering code from the other column.

Previously, selecting worked like it did for any table in a web page, in that the selection would span both columns, making it impossible to get the text out cleanly. With this new support, you can safely copy a block of text from the original or modified file and paste it into your editor.

Better e-mail control

We’ve reduced how much e-mail you’ll receive in certain cases. For instance, if a review request is updated to add new reviewers, without altering any other fields or introducing a new diff, only the new reviewers will be notified of the update.

We’ve also introduced an option to let you opt out of any e-mails triggered by your own actions. To opt out, head over to the My Account page and uncheck “Get e-mail notifications for my own activity.”

Numerous bug fixes

We’ve fixed nearly 40 bugs across the site, covering issues with repository compatibility, diff generation, usability, e-mail notifications, and more.

 

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RBTools 0.6.3 is released!

Christian Hammond

Today’s release of RBTools 0.6.3 fixes a handful of annoying little bugs across Git, Mercurial, Subversion, Perforce, and ClearCase. If you use any one of these (and there’s a good chance you do), it’s time to upgrade!

In past releases, failed post operations could leave behind incomplete review requests, which wasn’t always obvious. RBTools will now print out the review request after a failure, making it easier to fix things up without creating a new review request.

We’ve also fixed a bug in the Python API for Review Board that resulted in errors when performing HTTP DELETE operations.

See the release notes for the complete list of fixes.

While this is a fairly small and bug-oriented release, we’re happy to announce that RBTools 0.7 is coming soon, with several new features and native installers for Windows and MacOS X!

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Auto-closing review requests when pushing changes

Christian Hammond

We’ve launched a new feature today for simplifying your code review workflow.

If you’re using GitHub, Bitbucket, or Google Code, RBCommons can now automatically close your review requests when you push your commits to your repository, making use of the service’s “post-commit” hooks. You’ll no longer need to click Close -> Submitted, saving time and keeping your dashboard clean.

 

Usage is simple

Once you’re set up (and we’ll go into that in a minute), all you need to do is include the following in your commit message:

Reviewed at https://rbcommons.com/s/<your-team>/r/<id>/

Or:

Review Request #<id>

Just commit, and your review request will be automatically closed, along with a message containing the commit revision and which branch it was committed to.

 

Setting this up

Setup depends on which service you’re using for your repositories, but we’ve worked to make it pretty simple.

We’ve added some new buttons to your Team Administration -> Repositories page. You’ll see a “Hooks” button next to any supported repository. Click that, and you’ll see instructions on turning this feature on for your repository. In just seconds, your repository will be set up!

This feature is still new, but has been undergoing testing for several weeks. If you hit any snags, let us know and we’ll help get you going.

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RBCommons and this week’s security news

Christian Hammond

This has been an interesting week on the Internet, security-wise. A vulnerability in the Bash shell (named “Shellshock”) was announced that allows remote execution of code on unpatched servers with certain configurations. Separately, an undisclosed vulnerability in Xen forced AWS and Rackspace to announce mandatory reboots of many of their customers’ servers. (See Amazon’s announcement and Rackspace’s announcement for more details.)

We’d like to give an overview of how all this is affecting RBCommons and, in turn, you.

We keep a close eye on all security updates available for the software and libraries we use, and are quick to patch our servers as fixes roll out. We’ve also performed many tests to ensure that malicious Shellshock HTTP requests do not impact us. Your data is safe.

Some of the services we use were affected by the mandatory AWS and Rackspace reboots. Earlier today, our mail provider, Mailgun, was temporarily down during the outage, which may have resulted in missing or delayed e-mails for those working on Sunday.

We’ve had a few rare DNS lookup failures, resulting in errors when visiting pages or otherwise interacting with RBCommons. There have only been four so far, and are temporary. If you see a random error loading a page, please just try again. We know this failure has affected a number of other AWS customers as well.

Tonight at 11PM PST, Amazon is scheduling some of our servers for a 6 hour maintenance window. This isn’t the first set of our servers to have undergone the mandatory maintenance, and we aren’t expecting any interruption to RBCommons during this time. However, we may be running at reduced capacity for about 20-30 minutes. We will be monitoring things closely.

If you are repeatedly hitting problems with RBCommons, please contact us!

We’ll post further updates if there’s anything to report.

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