Djblets

I’ve made some fixes to the extension packaging today that allow stylesheets in an extension to reference assets (images, fonts, other stylesheets) found in Review Board or Djblets. This wasn’t working before, due to some assumptions Django makes when it comes to post-processing and packaging of static files.

Django allows you to define a list of static namespaces with a given name, and any static path starting with that name is looked up in that resource. So, djblets/images/<blah> or rb/fonts/<blah>.

Works great in templates and everywhere else, except for static file packaging. There, the assumption appears to be that any referenced resources live in the same app. The paths built are always relative to the directory or the top of the static namespace, making it impossible to do the kind of references an extension author would want.

Well, almost impossible. I pretty much beat that into submission. And here it is: https://reviews.reviewboard.org/r/7437/

Djblets is our Django utility library full of reusable components for Review Board. It has datagrids (which powers the dashboard), the API framework, the extension framework, dynamic site configuration, and lots of other utilities.

We just landed a set of changes to bring compatibility with Django 1.8! Let me tell you, going from 1.6 to 1.8 is a huge process, and retaining compatibility with both is not easy. Still, this is a big step.

That’s going into Djblets 0.9, but experimentally. We may actually lock Djblets 0.9 to Django 1.6.x, in order to prevent scenarios where a user upgrades Djblets and it accidentally pulls in the wrong version of Django. We’ll see, though

Also, this does not mean Review Board is anywhere near supporting Django 1.8. That’s a loooong ways off. Review Board 3.0 at the earliest. There’s a lot of work to do there still, and a lot of work to do in Django Evolution to convert to Django’s new migrations support.

(That part is scary.)

Extensions can now reference static assets from Djblets/Review Board

Djblets now mostly works with Django 1.8!