Review Board Status Update

It’s been just over a month since the last Review Board status update. I thought this time I’d start off with a few stats.

• Bugs open: 19
• Bugs fixed: 97
• Feature requests open: 27
• Contributors: 10
• Companies using Review Board: at least 13

If you’re part of an open source project or company using Review Board, we’d love to hear from you and your experience. We’d like to make a list of who’s using Review Board, so if you’re able to list your project/company, please let us know!

Now on to the feature updates.

• Internet Explorer compatibility. Internet Explorer should now work properly with Review Board. A lot of work was recently done to make this happen and it hasn’t been as extensively tested as we’d like just yet, but things do appear to be working. Firefox is still the preferred (and targetted) browser, but do feel free to try IE and let us know if anything breaks.
• CVS support. Review Board now supports CVS repositories. Right now there’s only :pserver support, though, but patches are welcome.
• Improved post-review script. post-review, the script of choice for creating and updating review requests from the command line, now supports both Perforce and Subversion, with support for more systems on the way. A single post-review script can now handle a variety of repositories for different projects, and projects can be set up to point post-review to the right Review Board server.
• Column sorting and list paging. Columns in the dashboard and review request lists can now be sorted by summary, submitter, posted time or last updated time. There’s also an improved pager at the bottom for skipping to other pages in the list.
• Collapsed diff sections can now be expanded. The brown “n lines hidden” boxes in the diff viewer can be individually expanded without reloading the page by clicking a little “Expand” link on the box. This makes it easy to get more context when needed without expanding the entire diff and having to reload the page.
• Cross-platform CRLF support. Diffs generated on Windows will now apply correctly on Review Board instances running on Linux, and vice-versa.
• Improved diff loading times. Large diffs take a while to load, but we’ve improved this slightly by caching much of the resulting diff so that it doesn’t have to be regenerated again. More work is planned in this area to improve loading times, but it’s a lot more usable now.
• More reliable database migration. The database migration scripts didn’t scale very well due to the existing Django libraries we were making use of being problematic for large database sizes. We’ve now fixed this, and they should be more reliable and hopefully a bit faster as well. There’s now a percentage complete indicator when loading back in.
• Anonymous access to Review Board. It’s no longer necessary to have an account in order to view review requests and diffs. This is desirable for most open source projects. The old behavior of requiring an account for site-wide access can still be enabled, but is disabled by default.

In the works is a much improved diff parser that won’t require lsdiff on the server hosting Review Board. This should make things a little easier for people installing on Windows, and it also cleans up the code quite nicely. This should be in sometime this week.