Release notes for Gerrit 2.1.1, 2.1.1.1

A deadlock was recently discovered in the SSHD, causing an IoProcessor thread to freeze and stop servicing clients. This manifests itself as spotty SSH service; sometimes a connection works, sometimes it hangs and never executes the command. Fixed.

Discarding a comment from the publish comments screen caused a ConcurrentModificationException. Fixed.

JavaScript code generation is now based upon GWT 2.0, which is the latest stable release available. One benefit of this is the initial JavaScript download is smaller, by omitting less-frequently used sections of the UI like the admin screens or user preferences.

Developers can now create new users (to facilitate testing scenarios) through the /become URL, rather than manually inserting account records or switching over to OpenID/LDAP.

The linkage to gitweb is now more configurable, and we also support linking to cgit, a popular C based alternative to the Perl based gitweb.cgi.

SSH authentication failures and commands are now logged, including execution times, so administrators can monitor server activity. The log file is local to the server running the daemon process, and came about to help replace the lastUsedOn columns which were dropped from the database (see below).

The lastUsedOn column is no longer updated in the database, and was actually removed by a schema upgrade in this release.

Merge commits created by Gerrit during change submission now use the submitter’s identity as the author identity, and generic Gerrit user identity as the committer identity.

The short description of a merge commit including exactly one change into the branch now includes that change’s short description, making the log easier to read.

The site header/footer files are reloaded on the fly if they are modified, allowing the administrator to abuse the header for a "message of the day" feature, if desired.

The host page was compacted slightly, and the CPU time used on the server to send it to a client was reduced by reusing as much work as possible between sessions. Additionally, the host page now selects the correct JavaScript based on the User-Agent HTTP header, removing one HTTP round trip during initial page load, and saving ~5 KiB of transfer.

The address bar now only updates when the corresponding content is actually visible. This matches the behavior used within other AJAX applications like Gmail.

Error dialogs are now more noticeable, and less easily dismissed by an accidental click. This is especially useful when there is a merge error during submit.

Commit replacements were sometimes rejected when the only thing that changed as the parent pointer, e.g. rebasing a change because the parent’s commit message was modified to correct a typo. We now allow these replacements, with a warning to the console.

The gsql tool skipped the first column of any table, e.g. when showing "\d accounts" the registered_on column wasn’t displayed.

The WAR file shrank because we deleted a large chunk of JavaScript which was never used. GWT created this code in case the browser didn’t get forced into the en locale, but we always force it to use the en locale because the top of our HTML page demands it.

This test failed when the JVM’s default locale wasn’t en_US, as it was testing a translated string against an English expected value.

This test failed on Windows platforms, where there is no shell or perl available from a native Win32 application like the JVM. For now, we skip the test.

The out-of-the-box build of Gerrit’s own source code didn’t work, due to missing Maven repository URLs in our pom.xml. I never noticed the failure because my local repository already had the required JARs present.

Releases between 2.0.18 and 2.1.1 have not supported MSIE 8, due to a broken GWT upgrade. Fixed.

Exceptions may have allowed our internal gitweb CGI invocations to leak file descriptors, as pipes to the external CGI were not always closed. Fixed.