As the holidays quickly approach, we’re trying to wrap up what we can from some of our bigger projects so we can enjoy some much-needed downtime with our loved ones. Thanksgiving is only a week away, and we’ll be taking a short break from ChangeLog in order to focus on stuffing ourselves full of turkey.

So this week will be a but short, but we wanted to go over the next Review Board release on our roadmap, Review Board 3.0.16.

It’s been 5 months!

Yeah, we haven’t had a 3.0.x release in a while. There’s a few reasons for this, and we’ve gone over some of them before. In summary, we’ve been focusing primarily on getting Review Board 4.0 done and adding some much-needed improvements to RBCommons.

Believe it or not, though, there’s active work going into 3.0.16, right now. As in, I’m taking a break from writing 3.0.16 code to write this ChangeLog.

What’s coming?

So there’s an assortment of bug fixes, for sure. Things like:

• Subversion diff parsing improvements
• Better bullet-proofing when dealing with truncated Bitbucket webhook payloads
• Fixes for edge cases where dashboard counters might not update correctly
• Some search indexing improvements

Along with that, though, we’re making some more important mini-architectural changes:

• New API for updating a user’s name, e-mail address, and active flag (indicating whether they’re still able to use the server)
• New API for filtering review requests based on the Branch field
• Some future-proofing around registration of SCMTools (which handle talking to repositories like Git and Subversion) and HostingServices (which talk to services like GitHub and Bitbucket)
• Allowing repository configuration to show custom forms for different types of repositories (in-progress)

These are actually pretty important improvements that we wanted to finish before releasing 3.0.16. The API changes are based on a lot of user feedback, and we’re going to finally get this to you soon (sorry for the wait!)

The repository-related functionality is going to not only allow for a better repository configuration experience, but to open the door soon for official support for ClearCase.

ClearCase

Historically, our ClearCase support was entirely community-driven. We were dependent on volunteers to develop and test any fixes or improvements going into that support. This was tough for us, because we know many of you out there do use ClearCase and have had trouble upgrading Review Board due to breakages that we just couldn’t do much about.

This is changing. While it’s still early in development, I’m glad to say we’ll be able to announce a new official ClearCase integration before too long. This will be part of Power Pack and will replace the old, sorta-bitrotted and limited community version.

We’ll have more on this later, but for those of you using ClearCase, we want you to know that improvements are coming. Not for 3.0.16 — again, it’s still early — but before too long.

What about Review Board 4.0?

The last major thing left before beta 1 is a completion of the new administration UI, a topic we’ve also discussed before. This is a big project, required for moving to Django 1.11 and Python 3, but it’s mostly done now. We’re aiming for a 4.0 beta 1 in January, and fast-tracking beta 2 after.

So stay tuned for that after the holidays!

Wrapping Up

That’s it for this week! Again, we’re off next week, probably collectively in food comas. We’ll resume the following week.

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 if you want other ways to keep up with what we’re up to.

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