RBTools 0.5.5 is released

January 14, 2014December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We just put out a release of RBTools 0.5.5. This fixes a handful of problems reported to us for rbt patch, Subversion, and Git.

rbt patch, one of our new tools introduced in 0.5.3, has had several bug fixes for applying commits to Git, and for properly handling Unicode characters in commit messages.

We fixed an issue with looking up repositories using Subversion. Some of you using the suggested RBTools configuration for your Subversion repositories have reported problems, which we’ve addressed in this release. Please let us know if you still encounter any issues.

When using rbt post with --revision-range revision1:revision2, RBTools 0.5.3 would fail to parse the revisions. While it allowed '..'-separated revisions, support for ':' was prematurely removed. We’ve restored this compatibility for now, but there are big changes coming in RBTools 0.6.

To upgrade your copy of RBTools, run:

    sudo easy_install -U RBTools

See the release notes for more information.

RBTools 0.5.3 is released

January 2, 2014December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We have a great RBTools release for you today, with some new features and a whole lot of bug fixes.

rbt post has a new -u option that attempts to update an existing review request, instead of posting a new one. Previously, you would have to pass -r <review_request_id>. Now, when using -u, RBTools will look up possible matches and present them. We think this will be a major time-saver.

A new rbt setup-repo command makes setting up your repository much easier. Instead of writing a new .reviewboardrc file by hand, just run rbt setup-repo. It will prompt for your RBCommons team’s URL (for example, https://rbcommons.com/s/my-team/, try to locate the right repository entry, and then write the configuration file for you.

rbt patch has two new options for working with patches. --print will print the patch to the terminal instead of applying it. --commit (Git only for now) will commit the patch with the author’s name and review request’s description.

rbt diff doesn’t crash anymore! Huzzah!

Along with this, we have fixes and improvements for using third-party commands, Git, Bazaar, Mercurial, and Subversion.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

Happy New Year from RBCommons

January 1, 2014December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We hope you had a great 2013. We sure did, and 2014 looks to be even better. We have a number of new things coming in the next several months that we’re sure you’ll love.

First, let’s talk newsletters.

Up until now, all our announcements have taken place on our blog and on Twitter, but that’s not always the best way to keep you up-to-date.

We’ve just made it easier to keep current on the latest updates to RBCommons and to RBTools. You’ll now find an E-Mail Announcements section on your My Account page where you can easily subscribe or unsubscribe to our newsletters. These cover RBCommons and RBTools updates, as well as code review tips and tricks.

You’ll only hear from us when we have something that’s worth your time.

We are also not subscribing anyone by default. If you don’t choose to subscribe, you won’t receive any more e-mails from us unless it is truly important.

What’s coming in 2014

Over the next couple of months, we’ll be introducing support for two-factor authentication and PDF document review.

Two-factor authentication will help keep your account secure by making use of your mobile devices to verify that it’s actually you logging into your account.

PDF document review works much like code or image review. If you upload a PDF onto a review request, your team will be able to flip through the pages and make comments on sections of the document. Useful for specifications, manuals, or anything else.

We’re also working on a large update to our Review Board software, which RBCommons is based on. Among other things, this release will provide:

Markdown support for review requests and comments
Easy posting of review requests for changes already pushed to your repository
An improved diff viewer with better move detection, better interdiff support, an improved revision selector, and a fresher design
Faster loads and fewer reloads
Batch operations in the dashboard (useful when you want to close several review requests at once)
Full-text search of all your review requests and reviews
New API additions for matching review requests and commits
Much more. You can see our beta 1 announcement for some details, and keep watching for a beta 2 announcement.

We’re aiming to bring this to you by Summer this year. Sooner, if all goes well. We’ll keep you informed on our blog and newsletters.

Thanks for reading, and have a great year!

GitHub two-factor auth, and a new My Account page

November 25, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

Tonight’s update introduces support for GitHub accounts protected with two-factor authentication, and a whole new My Account page.

GitHub’s two-factor authentication is a great way to protect your account, and we highly recommend it, especially since there have been a number of attempts made on GitHub accounts in recent weeks. Previously, administrators had to disable two-factor authentication before linking an account for the first time (when configuring a repository), but no longer. The first time you link an account, you’ll be prompted for your two-factor auth token.

If you already have a GitHub account linked for your repositories, you won’t have to do anything. If you’re not an administrator, same. You’re good.

We also rewrote the My Account page. The old page was a holdover from the early days, and was long overdue for a rewrite. You should find it a lot more organized, and we’ll be adding to it over the coming months.

Along with all that, some nice bug fixes and performance improvements. Enjoy!

Tonight’s round of improvements for teams

November 16, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We deployed an update tonight that makes some small but very useful changes throughout the site.

Your account menu at the top of every page has been tweaked to show your username, instead of your first name. We found that people sometimes forgot which username they registered with, which this should help a lot with. Inside the menu, you’ll see a little card showing your gravatar, name, and e-mail address, along with the usual menu items for changing your account profile and logging out.

Next to your account menu is your new Team menu. Here you’ll see your team and a menu item for creating new teams. If you’re an administrator, you’ll also be able to get to your Team Administration page from here. If you’re a member of more than one team on RBCommons, it also offers an easy way to switch between them.

This menu also gave us the opportunity to make another change. When you visit RBCommons.com, you’ll now be taken directly to your dashboard, skipping the old and shabby “home” screen altogether.

One last thing, for administrators. The interface for adding or editing review groups in the Team Administration page was not up to par. We’ve revamped this, and it’s much nicer, particularly for user selection.

And that’s it! Enjoy, and keep the great feedback coming.

Announcing new abilities for team administrators

November 9, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

Nobody likes a cluttered dashboard. It makes it harder to see what’s left to review in a day, and can have an impact on how often people check for what needs a review.

Sometimes this happens because someone has left the company. Sometimes people forget.

One of the most frequent requests we’ve had is to give team administrators a way to manage the mess. Today, we’re happy to announce that this feature has finally arrived.

Team administrators now have the ability to modify, close or reopen any review request on their team. You can also leave a message in the close description saying, for example, that the original owner left the company, or that the change was committed to a certain branch.

When posting through RBTools, you’ll also be able to post changes on behalf of another user, by passing the --submit-as=<username> flag to rbt post (or post-review, if you’re still using that). This is very useful if you’re looking to automate creating review requests.

In the future, we plan to make it possible to grant these abilities to other members of your team without giving full administrator rights.

New Beta Release: Review Board Power Pack

September 3, 2013December 28, 2017 David Trowbridge

Review Board Power Pack

Until now, we’ve been running two separate beta programs for PDF Review and “Review Board Enterprise”. We’ve decided to merge these together into a single product that we’re calling the “Review Board Power Pack.”

The major features of the combined package are:

Review PDF documents that are attached to review requests, commenting directly on the text, all in the browser with no extra plug-ins.
GitHub Enterprise support.
The ability to add capacity to your Review Board server by adding additional front-end servers.

Changes in the new preview

In addition to merging together the features of our two previous beta packages, there are some improvements and bug fixes for PDF Review in this release:

The outline mode in the sidebar now shows the tree structure of the table of contents.
When a document has a table of contents, the sidebar now allows switching between either the outline mode or the pages mode.
Scrolling behavior when using the mouse wheel or touch-pad gestures has improved significantly, making it easier to get all the way to the bottom of the document.
Non-PDF documents like .docx are no longer detected as PDF.
When attaching a PDF file with drag-and-drop, you can now click on the thumbnail to jump to the review UI to preview the document.
Several issues with PDF rendering have been fixed.
A fair amount of visual design polish.

Getting the Power Pack

If you already signed up for the beta, you should have an email explaining how to install it (or upgrade from the first beta). If you haven’t signed up, but would like to participate, please fill out our sign-up form and we’ll be in touch.

Once we have a final release, these features will be available on RBCommons.com for our larger tiers.

Announcing support for Beanstalk and Bitbucket Git

August 15, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We’re happy to announce that we’ve added support for two heavily requested code hosting services: Beanstalk, and Bitbucket Git repositories.

Welcome, Beanstalk!

Beanstalk is a code hosting and development service with support for Git and Subversion. It integrates with a variety of services and offers easy deployment to servers. They offer a free 30 day trial, and have reasonably priced packages for teams and businesses of all sizes.

To add a Beanstalk repository to RBCommons, you first need to enable API support for your account. Log into Beanstalk and click Account on the top-right. Then scroll down to Developer API and enable it.

Then, on RBCommons, simply add a repository and choose Beanstalk as the hosting service. Enter your Beanstalk account domain (the mydomain part of mydomain.beanstalkapp.com), your repository name, and save. You’re set up!

Bitbucket Git is finally here

As of today, you’ll be able to use Git repositories hosted on Bitbucket. Before today, Bitbucket was only usable with Mercurial. You can simply add your repository like any other repository. Just choose Bitbucket as the hosting service, and Git for the repository type.

You will need to install RBTools 0.5.2 and use rbt post in order to post your diffs for Bitbucket Git repositories. Unfortunately, due to some limitations in the Bitbucket APIs, you cannot use git diff or older versions of RBTools.

To all new users

We have guides for helping you get set up quickly. Please see our Getting Started guide, and Posting Patches for Review.

If you’re signing up for Beanstalk or Bitbucket Git support, let us know! You can tell us where you came from when creating your team.

Site Update: New goodies and speedups

June 29, 2013December 28, 2017 Christian Hammond

We’ve deployed some new updates to RBCommons that should please many of you. Let’s go through the highlights.

New “Depends On” field

When you’re working with several inter-dependent changes, it’s helpful to give your fellow teammates a heads up on what depends on what. That helps them prioritize what to review, and gives them some context on what they’re looking at.

We’ve added a Depends On field to review requests for listing the review request IDs your change depends on. Each listed review request will then show that they block your change. A small change, but one we’re sure will be helpful to many of you.

Performance Improvements

We’ve worked hard to improve performance for uploading new diffs. From here on, as you begin to upload and view more diffs, we collect more information on what files and revisions we know exist, and which we know don’t exist. We use this to avoid some of the lookups we used to do before against your repositories.

For those of you who are very active and use GitHub, this drastically reduces the API lookups we have to do, speeding up diffs, and making it even harder to hit the dreaded GitHub API rate limits.

Nicer dashboard refreshing

The dashboard used to do a full-page reload every so often to refresh your view, which was.. noticeable. It was also pretty nasty when your connection to the server was interrupted, or when it tried to refresh during an RBCommons server upgrade, as you would come back to an error page.

You won’t see these issues anymore. The dashboard intelligently refreshes itself without a full page reload, and is resistant to temporary outages.

And more

There’s also a handful of bug fixes and some interface polish, particularly around issue tracking. We hope you like this update.

PDF Review Beta 2

June 3, 2013December 28, 2017 David Trowbridge

A few weeks ago, we did our first private beta release for an extension for collaborative peer review of PDF documents. If you haven’t seen it yet, we encourage you to check out the original announcement, which explains the basic workflow.

Since that first release, we’ve received a lot of great feedback, and have been working hard to improve it. We’re proud to announce a new beta release, with several significant improvements:

Continuous scroll through the document!
Significant performance improvements when switching between pages.
Review emails now contain the selected sections for each comment.
Comments on the “Reviews” page and in review emails now link to the relevant page in the document.
Improved interaction when dragging out comment areas.
Improved visual layout, maximizing the amount of space for the document.
Fixed an issue where the page would continually make requests to the server when thumbnail storage fails (for example, if the PIL version on the server can’t handle PNG compression).