Roadmap
With the upcoming release of Django 1.0 in the next few weeks, we decided it was time to formalize a roadmap for Review Board 1.0. The roadmap provides a good overview of what users can expect for our release, and what it will take to get there.
At this point we’re asking for people to contribute wherever possible. The big thing is fixing bugs targeted for the 1.0 release. We’d also like some help in finalizing unit tests.
Quality Control
We’re doing what we can to improve quality control in Review Board. For a lot of people, Review Board works great, though setups often differ and some users hit issues that others never see. For this, we’re trying to improve our unit tests to catch these various cases. When people submit patches, we’d greatly appreciate unit tests to cover the new code, and in some cases will require them for the code submission.
Selenium
We will soon start using Selenium in our unit test process to simulate user action in various web browsers. Selenium allows for remote-controlling a web browser, simulating clicks, text input, and other user actions and checking the results. Over time, when our Selenium test suite is more complete, we should be able to catch browser-specific problems a lot more easily.
Buildbot Server
Another issue users have hit lately is breakages due to changes in Django for the 1.0 release. As things calm down there, this will become less of an issue, but we’ve put things in place to catch these problems before users do.
We have just set up a buildbot server that will perform a full build and run the test suite whenever there’s a code check-in to Review Board, Django, Djblets or Django-Evolution. It will then notify us when there’s a new breakage. Users can check the build page before updating just to make sure they won’t hit a major problem. Later on, our buildbot server will generate nightly builds and handle Selenium tests.
We have a limited number of servers to test with. If you have server space and resources to donate and would like to run a BuildBot Slave server, let me know. We’re looking to set up slaves to test various combinations of the following:
- Python 2.5
- Python 2.4
- Django SVN trunk
- Django 1.0
- Windows 2000, XP and Vista
- Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (for Selenium tests)
- Opera (for Selenium tests)
- Firefox 2 and 3 (for Selenium tests)
Sandbox
Our BuildBot server is also set up to allow us to test code changes before we submit the code. Running a sandbox build of our pending code will cause all build slaves to run the entire test suite. This ensures that we don’t break things accidentally.
If you’re a contributor working on large patches for Review Board and would like to have access to the sandbox, please post to the mailing list and we can work with you on getting an account set up.
Installation Improvements
We’re working to make the installation experience much easier. I’m in the process of creating Python easy_install packages for Review Board and Djblets. Soon, users will be able to simply easy_install ReviewBoard to get going instead of checking out the development tree. I’m hoping to create both nightly builds and release builds.
Code will soon go in to move the entire project configuration into the administration interface. Modifying settings_local.py and restarting the server will be a thing of the past. All that will be left there will be a few site-specific settings and the database settings. Expect this to go in real soon.
A tool is in development for helping to generate the initial Review Board server tree based on an installed reviewboard Python module (using easy_install) and generating the web server configuration files. This will hopefully take care of a lot of problems people hit when trying to get their server configuration right the first time.
And last but not least, before 1.0 we will have a first-time installation page that handles the creation of the initial settings_local.py and the adding and checking of repositories.
So in the end, the installation process will be something along the lines of:
- sudo easy_install ReviewBoard
- sudo rb-install-site /var/www/reviews.mycompany.com
- Fill out the fields presented.
- Hand-tweak the configuration files if needed.
- Go to the page for the new Review Board server, fill out the fields and finish the install.
This is the goal, anyway. We’re going to try to get as close to this as possible for 1.0.
Donations
Review Board has become a full-time project for us. Though it got its start at VMware, it’s really a personal project developed in our spare time, not a project run by VMware. As the project grows, we’ve been putting more time, energy and money into it.
Hosting fees have started to become large, given that we’re now hosting the main project website, the main Review Board server for our code reviews, the demo server, the Google Summer of Code review server and the BuildBot server and slaves. Down the road, we have many plans that will also require funding.
To help cover our costs, we’re now made it easy to donate to the project. If Review Board has helped you, your company, team, or project and saved you money or time over alternative solutions, maybe you’d like to help give back to keep our project going. Every bit helps.
Speaking of various combinations to test, 32- vs 64-bit platforms are another variable to consider. hash(some_string) will return different values on 32- and 64-bit Pythons for some strings. C extension modules may also have trouble if they use int where they should use size_t (or whatever the Python equivalent is) etc.