RBTools Releases

RBTools 3.1.2, Power Pack 5.1.1

Christian Hammond

Today, we’re bringing two new releases of RBTools and Power Pack, focusing on stability and feature improvements.

RBTools 3.1.2 Highlights

  • Now supports the upcoming Python 3.11.
  • Added back directory change information to diffs for ClearCase and VersionVault, and fixed problems posting symlinks.
  • Fixed several issues generating Perforce diffs, especially on Python 3.
  • Fixed applied patches on Subversion.

To learn more about this release, see the RBTools 3.1.2 release notes.

Power Pack 5.1.1 Highlights

  • Added support for showing changes to directories when using ClearCase or VersionVault
  • Fixed broken repository configuration forms when selecting Cliosoft SOS on Review Board 4.0.3 or older.

This upgrade is available for all existing Power Pack users.

To learn more about this release, see the Power Pack 5.1.1 release notes.

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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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RBTools 1.0.3: Mercurial Features, Commit Editing, Python 3 Fixes

Christian Hammond

Today’s release of RBTools 1.0.3 is a big one, featuring enhancements for Mercurial support, a vastly improved commit editing experience when landing changes, and several compatibility fixes for Python 3 and various types of repositories.

Landing Commits on Mercurial

rbt land now supports landing commits on Mercurial repositories.

You can land a local change from a Mercurial branch or bookmark, or a remote change from a review request. This will first verify that the change has been approved on Review Board before allowing it to land. Once approved, a new merge commit containing the information and URL of the review request will be placed on your destination branch.

This can also close the branch/bookmark being merged in on your behalf. See the documentation for details.

Improved Commit Editing

Patching a commit with rbt patch -c, or landing a commit with rbt land -e has always let you edit the message for the commit, but the experience was sub-par.

Now RBTools will mimic Git or Mercurial’s standard editing environment, helping your editor show the syntax highlighting or line length limits it would normally show.

Deleting all text in the editor and saving will cancel the patch/land operation.

You can also set a custom editor when working with RBTools by setting the new $RBTOOLS_EDITOR environment variable.

Compatibility Fixes

We’ve fixed a number of Python 3 compatibility issues. These largely centered around:

  • Changes in Python 3.8
  • Windows environment differences
  • Editing or processing commits containing non-ASCII characters
  • Normalizing URLs and paths for Subversion
  • Loading in Perforce metadata
  • Passing --help as the last argument

There’s also a fix for looking up available Git remotes for a branch when a tracking branch isn’t set. Thanks to Joshua Olson for this fix!

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

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RBTools 1.0.2: Fixes for Python 3, Two-Factor Auth, and More

Christian Hammond

Improved Python 3 Support

RBTools 1.0 introduced support for Python 3, and since then many more of our users have switched over and sent us patches to improve that support. We’ve also improved our testing, helping us to maintain a more stable Python 3 codebase.

Two-Factor Auth for RBCommons

The support for Two-Factor Authentication in RBCommons has been completely redone to avoid login rate limit issues, missing headers, and trouble logging in.

Going forward, RBTools 1.0.2 will be the minimum version required for RBCommons accounts using Two-Factor Authentication.

Git Improvements

We’ve improved upon the smart tracking branch detection logic introduced in RBTools 1.0, which is designed to find the right tracking branch for your local changes. It now does a better job of finding a suitable branch if your repository doesn’t have an origin remote, and gives priority to the one provided in --tracking-branch.

Support for disabling Git file rename detection has also been added, for those cases where Git is getting too aggressive and making for bad diffs. Simply pass --no-renames to rbt post or rbt diff to generate a diff without renamed files.

A Step Toward Better Error Messages

We’ve working to improve error messages throughout our products, to help guide people when things go wrong.

If RBTools is pointing to a bad Review Board URL, it no longer just fails with an HTTP status code or cryptic error message. RBTools will now inspect the URL to determine what may have gone wrong, and offer guidance on resolving the problem.

Error messages in our API and other commands have also been fixed. We’ll be making further improvements in future releases.

Plus More

  • Perforce diffs now contain information on binary files
  • Aliases invoking shell commands now preserve their quotes and escape sequences
  • Patches from users with private profiles enabled can now be applied to new commits without crashing

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

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RBTools 1.0.1 is out now

Christian Hammond

Today’s release of RBTools fixes some of the most common issues experienced in the recent 1.0 release:

Improved Windows compatibility

This release fixes some regressions on Windows, namely a crash when prompting for a password for Review Board.

If you’re continuing to hit problems on Windows, please let us know in our community support tracker so we can collect additional information on your setup.

Fixes for Empty Diff errors on Git

While RBTools 1.0 greatly improved how diffs were generated for Git repositories under many scenarios, it broke one important workflow.

Posting a branch for review after pushing that branch upstream no longer results in errors about empty diffs when a tracking branch is configured. Instead, the tracking branch is once again respected, allowing your topic branch to be posted for review in full.

See the release notes for the full list of changes.

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RBTools 1.0 is here!

Christian Hammond

RBTools has been an important part of the life of Review Board users for many years. While it started off as a single tool for posting review requests, its feature set has evolved with time, turning into an extensible set of tools and APIs for talking to Review Board.

Today, we’re finally pulling RBTools out of the 0.x era with the release of RBTools 1.0.

Compatible with Python 3

Both the RBTools commands and the Python API now support Python 2.7 and 3.5+.

(Please let us know if you hit any issues on Python 3, as this is still pretty new.)

Better Repository Detection and Git Support

RBTools now does a better job determining which repository it’s working with, in case there’s confusion. For example, a Mercurial repository nested in a Git-managed home directory will no longer cause problems.

Git repositories in particular are now easier to work with. When generating a diff, RBTools now looks for the nearest upstream parent commit or branch, instead of requiring that users or repositories configure a specific tracking branch.

Publish Automated Reviews

Writing your own automated review solutions for Review Board 3.0 or RBCommons just became easier through the new rbt status-update command. Your scripts can use it to file a pending status update on a review request (showing that checks are being performed) and then update it to say that all is well or to report issues that need to be fixed.

This is useful for in-house continuous integration setups where you’re analyzing code for errors, style issues, documentation, or any other requirements you might have.

Easily Land Complex Dependent Changes

rbt land can now land multiple review requests tied together using the Depends On field.

This works with -r to take the ID of the review request you want to land. It will figure out which review requests must land before it and in which order. For example, if review request 3 depends on 2, which depends on 1, you can run:

$ rbt land --recursive -r 3

Instead of:

$ rbt land -r 1
$ rbt land -r 2
$ rbt land -r 3

This is a precursor to the new DVCS support coming soon in Review Board 4.0.

And That’s Not All

  • rbt setup-completion was added to enable auto-completion of RBTools commands and arguments in Bash and ZSH shells.

  • rbt alias was added to help you list and test out your custom aliases.

  • rbt post –submit-as can now automate posting review request updates, and not just new review requests, on a user’s behalf.

  • rbt post -m and rbt publish -m let you specify a custom description of your draft’s changes when publishing (equivalent to filling out the “Describe your changes” box when publishing in the browser).

  • rbt post –trivial-publish and rbt publish –trivial let you publish trivial updates to a review request without sending out e-mails to everyone (when using Review Board 3.0 or RBCommons).

  • rbt status now lists the review state and local branch for each review request you have up for review.

  • Warnings and errors in command output is now specially highlighted to help it stand out.

  • Several fixes and improvements for Git and Subversion compatibility.

  • The API has been improved, supporting extra_data fields and easier pagination of resources.

And plenty of other fixes and improvements. See the release notes for the full list of changes in 1.0.

Download It Today!

RBTools is out today for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Head on over to the downloads page for installation instructions.

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RBTools 0.7.10 is now out

Christian Hammond

Today’s release of RBTools 0.7.10 some important compatibility fixes for macOS, Git, Subversion, Team Foundation Server, ClearCase.

macOS and Browser Windows

macOS users who have upgraded to recent releases of Sierra lost the ability to run rbt post --open (to open the posted review request in a browser window) due to a Python/AppleScript bug. This is Python bug #30392, for those who are interested.

We’ve worked around this. Your default browser will work once again. Thanks to those who pointed this out!

There’s also a whole new macOS installer coming that should actually work on all setups. We’ll have this on the Downloads page once it gets a little more testing.

Git and Git-SVN

Git-SVN users should no longer encounter crashes when trying to post changes for review. That was pretty disruptive.

Git repositories with submodules containing pending changes no longer cause warnings about dirty repositories when posting changes. They’re not included anyway, and just added to the confusion.

Crazy Subversion Diffs

If you had a line of code being deleted that happened to look like a diff header (say, --- XX (YY)), it could cause some code we have for fixing up diffs to get very confused. That, unfortunately, could lead to lines being excluded from the diff, breaking when you try viewing it in the diff viewer.

We’ve rewritten this code to be very careful about these lines. It won’t get confused again.

Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio 2017

Team Foundation Server users who have upgraded to Visual Studio 2017 can once again post changes. TFS has had a nasty habit of changing their file formats, APIs, and command line options, but after much tearing out of the hair, we’ve restored compatibility.

All versions from Visual Studio 2011 onward should work just fine, so no need to upgrade to 2017 just to use this release.

We’ve also fixed a regression when using the Team Explorer Everywhere adapter.

ClearCase and Cross-Platform VOB Lookups

ClearCase users can now name their repositories in Review Board based on a component of a VOB path, instead of naming it based on the entire VOB path. This helps with the differences in how ClearCase represents VOB paths on different platforms. For instance, a VOB path of /vobs/MyVOB or C:\vobs\MyVOB will now match a repository name of MyVOB.

There are also some performance improvements for looking up VOBs.

And Other Such Things

There are improvements to the Python API, such as not prematurely exiting the process, plus compatibility fixes for Review Board 3.0. We’ve also added a new config option to disable certain warnings in RBTools, which would be especially useful for repository hook scripts.

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

To upgrade RBTools, visit the downloads page.

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RBTools 0.7.7 is released!

Christian Hammond

We’ve just put out an all-new release of RBTools. Version 0.7.7 features compatibility fixes for various types of repositories, better support for TFS, and some new features to help with common usage and automation.

You can see the release notes for the full list of changes. We’ll go over the highlights here.

Compatibility/bug fixes

In this release, we’ve aimed to fix a handful of compatibility problems that have been reported to us. Thanks to all the contributors who sent patches!

  • RBTools is once again compatible with Mercurial 2.x. This regressed in 0.7.6.
  • Some error displays are fixed when using the version of Python shipped with macOS 10.11.
  • Perforce gained the ability to post against null client roots, and fixed posting ranges of submitted changelists.
  • Repository lookups utilizing mirror paths or Subversion UUIDs now work once again. These regressed in 0.7.6.
  • rbt post for Git now supports --exclude-patterns when using git-svn or git-p4.
  • rbt land no longer crashes if it can’t determine the approval state on a review request.

Improved Team Foundation Server support

The old TFS support was a bit slow, due to the way we had to interact with the Team Foundation Server command line tools. It also presented compatibility problems, as different versions of Visual Studio shipped different, incompatible versions of these tools.

We’ve now introduced new support that doesn’t depend on their tools and is optimized for our use cases. This means better compatibility everywhere, faster posting, and new features.

To start with, we’re adding the ability to post shelved changesets! You can do this by simply running:

rbt post <shelveset-name>

To begin using RBTools 0.7.7 with TFS, you will need to install our new TFS adapter by typing:

rbt install tfs

New features

We’ve added the ability to specify a destination tracking branch for rbt land. To choose something other than the default (say, origin/master on Git), you can now specify:

rbt land --tracking-branch <branch-name>

If you find yourself needing to pass --svn-prompt-password all the time for your Subversion setup, you can set SVN_PROMPT_PASSWORD in your project’s or user’s .reviewboardrc instead. Just set this and you’ll never have to type it again:

SVN_PROMPT_PASSWORD = True

What’s coming next

We’re working toward a RBTools 1.0 release, which will feature enhanced support for Mercurial, new automation commands for use in the upcoming Review Board 3.0, easier setup and installation, and better display of progress when posting changes.

We’re also hard at work on a rewrite of our documentation, with the aim of providing more practical, detailed setup and usage guides for RBTools. These will begin to land over the next month.

If you have any bug reports or feature requests for either RBTools or the documentation, we’d love to hear them! You can file a bug or reach out to us on our reviewboard-dev discussion list.

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RBTools 0.7.6 is released!

Christian Hammond

Today’s all-new release of RBTools 0.7.6 comes with over a dozen improvements, from Mercurial and Perforce fixes to new Team Foundation Server capabilities to automation enhancements.

We’ve fixed some character set compatibility bugs with Team Foundation Server. There’s also new support for posting branched/copied files for review (this requires some changes we’ll be bringing to RBCommons in a big update this quarter), excluding files using --exclude, and specifying a custom path to tf.exe.

Perforce users should see more stability in edge cases, like posting deleted symbolic links for review or when dealing with Unicode mismatches between review requests and changesets.

Mercurial users can now safely use relative, negative, or short revisions when specifying commits to post for review.

We’ve improved RBTools’s behavior when running in a non-interactive console, allowed rbt api-get to be used outside of a source tree, and made it easier to work with paginated responses in the Python API.

Performance has been improved when looking up repositories on ClearCase and Subversion.

These are just some of the improvements made in RBTools 0.7.6. For the complete list, see the release notes.

To upgrade RBTools, visit the downloads page.

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RBTools 0.7.5 is here!

Christian Hammond

RBTools 0.7.5 is now out and ready to install.

This is largely a bug fix release, focusing in part on improved compatibility with Windows, Git, Subversion, Mercurial, Perforce, and Team Foundation Server.

On Windows, RBTools will now first look in %HOME% to find any custom .reviewboardrc files, instead of only looking in the Application Data directory, which will be quite helpful with many system configurations. There are also fixes for using Mercurial on Windows.

Non-Git user? You’ve probably seen that annoying but harmless command not found: git error when posting a change. That’s gone now!

For Perforce users, posting submitted changes or files outside of the client view now work. This had regressed in an earlier release, but you should be in good shape now.

Subversion has seen some more Unicode fixes, plus fixes for rbt post --svn-show-copies-as-adds.

Along with all this, we’ve added a new feature for setting a custom search path for .reviewboardrc. You can set your $RBTOOLS_CONFIG_PATH to a list of paths to search, allowing you to make your version in $HOME take precedence over what’s in your repository, and allowing you to work with centralized collections of aliases in your organization.

See the release notes for the complete list of changes.

One more thing: We’ve simplified installation for those of you using pip to install. Our builds are now directly hosted on PyPI, meaning all you now need to do to upgrade is run pip install -U RBTools.

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