Release notes for Gerrit 2.1.2

Differences within a replaced line are now highlighted with a brighter red or green background color. Some heuristics are applied to identify and highlight reindented blocks in popular C/C++/Java/C#-like and Python-like languages. The highlighting algorithm is still simple and could benefit from more fine-tuning, as its largely driven by a simple Myers O(ND) character difference over the replaced lines.

The configuration variable cache.diff.intraline can be used to disable this feature site-wide, if it causes problems.

The look-and-feel of the side-by-side viewer (and also of the unified viewer) has been significantly improved in this release. Coloring of regions is more consistently applied, reducing reader distraction. Comment boxes use a cleaner display, and take up less space per line.

Users can now set the tab size or number of columns when displaying a patch. Toggles are also available to enable or disable syntax coloring, intraline differences, whitespace errors, and visible tabs.

The side-by-side viewer now offers links to download the complete file of either the left or right side. To protect the users from malicious cross-site scripting attacks, the download links force the content to be wrapped inside of a ZIP archive with a randomized file name. Server administrators may use the mimetype.safe configuration setting to avoid this wrapping if they trust users to only upload safe file content.

The Show Full File checkbox in the file viewers no longer requires an RPC if the file is sufficiently small enough and syntax coloring was enabled. The browser can update the UI using the cached data it already has on hand.

If a file was renamed or copied, the side-by-side viewer now shows the old file path in the column header instead of the generic header text Old Version.

Gerrit now uses the Mozilla character set detection algorithm when trying to determine what charset was used to write a text file. For UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1/ASCII users, there should be no difference over prior releases. With this change, the server can now also automatically recognize source files encoded in:

The open changes views now show the status summary columns, just like a user dashboard shows. This requires an extra RPC per page display, but can save user time when trying to identify which reviews should be examined.

In Settings panels the delete button is enabled only if at least one row has been selected to be removed.

Like most POSIX commands, \-- now signifies the end of options for any command accessible over SSH.

Official release WARs now contain the formatted HTML documentation, and a Documentation menu will display in the main UI (alongside All, My, Admin) to help users access the local copy rather than jumping to the remote Google Code project site.

Download commands for patch sets are now offered as a tabbed panel, allowing the user to select between repo download, git pull, or git fetch … && git cherry-pick or git fetch … && git format-patch styles, as well as to select the transport protocol used, including anonymous Git or HTTP, or authenticated SSH or HTTP. The current selections are remembered for signed-in users, permitting end-users to quickly reuse their preferred method of grabbing a patch set.

Site administrators can now theme the UI with local site colors by setting theme variables in gerrit.config.

Almost all permissions are now per-branch within each project. This includes Code Review, Verified, Submit, Push Branch, and even Owner. Permissions can be set on a specific branch, or on a wildcard that matches all branches that start with that prefix. Read permission is still handled at the project level, but future versions should support per-branch read access as well.

The new MaxNoBlock category function can be used in a custom approval category for reviews that are performed by automated lint tools. See access control for more details on this function.

Git 1.6.6 and later support a more efficient HTTP protocol for both fetch/clone and push, by relying upon Git specific server side logic. Gerrit Code Review now includes the necessary server side support when accessing repositories using URLs of the form http://review.example.com/p/'$projectname'.git. Authentication over smart HTTP URLs is performed using standard HTTP digest authentication, with the username matching the SSH username, but the password coming from a field that is generated by Gerrit and accessible to the user on their Settings > SSH Keys tab. Smart HTTP requests enter the same resource queue as SSH requests, using the embedded Jetty server to suspend the request and later resume it when processing resources are available. This ensures HTTP repository requests don’t overtax the server when made concurrently with SSH requests.

The scp filesystem holding client side tools and hooks is now available over http://review.example.com/tools/'$name'. User documentation is updated with example URLs.

Change-Ids can now be searched for by accessing the URL http://example.com/r/'Ichangeid', similar to how commits can be searched by http://example.com/r/'commitsha1'.

SSH command arguments may now be quoted with double quotes, in addition to single quotes. This can make it easier to intermix quoting styles with the shell that is calling the SSH client .

Site administrator managed hook scripts can now be invoked at various points in processing. Currently these scripts are informational only and cannot influence the outcome of an event. For more details see hooks.

The new gerrit stream-events command can be used over SSH by an end-user to watch a live stream of any visible patch set creation, comments and change submissions. For more details see gerrit stream-events.

When httpd.listenUrl is http:// or https://, requests are logged into '$site_path'/logs/httpd_log. This mirrors the behavior of the SSH daemon, which also logs requests into the same directory. For proxy URLs HTTP requests aren’t logged, since the front-end server is expected to be performing the logging. Logging can be forced on, or forced off by setting httpd.requestLog.

The SSH daemon’s host key can now be used to authenticate as the magic user Gerrit Code Review. This user identity is blessed as even more powerful than a user in the Administrators group, as using it requires access to the private half of the host key. For example:

Additional public keys for the magical Gerrit Code Review user may be specified in an OpenSSH authorized_keys style file and are functionally equivalent to authenticating with the daemon’s host key. The keys are primarily intended to be other daemons, most likely slaves, that share the same set of repositories and database.

The new SSH based suexec command can only be invoked by the magic user Gerrit Code Review and permits executing any other command as any other registered user account. This forms the foundation of allowing a slave daemon process to transparently proxy any write request from a client forward to the current master.

The transparent proxy support is not yet implemented in the slave.

The gsql command now supports JSON as an output format, making software driven queries over SSH easier. The -c option accepts one query, executes it, and returns.

During receive Gerrit warns the user if their commit messages appears to be incorrectly formatted, by having lines that aren’t hard-wrapped or that has an extremely long subject line.

When Gerrit creates a merge commit in order to submit a change, the author information of the merge commit is taken from the submitter. If all of the commits being submitted were written by the submitter, the authorship of the merge commit is copied from one of those commits rather than from the user’s preferred account information.

The term "Publish Comments" was used on two different buttons that performed two different actions. The first usage was to open the screen which shows the scoring buttons, provides the cover letter editor, and shows the in-line comments for final review before publication. The button that opens that review screen has been renamed "Review". The second usage of the button was to actually send out the notification emails, and expose the comments to others. This button is still called "Publish Comments".

Syntax highlighting in the unified patch view isn’t useful if it hides the added and removed lines red/green text color. Disable it entirely so the add/remove coloring shows up instead.

If the file is really big (over 9000 lines), Show Full File is actually disabled on the server side, to prevent the client from being overrun with data. The UI now reflects this by disabling the checkbox for the user, and adds a tooltip to indicate why its greyed out.

Plain text files can’t benefit from syntax highlighting, its actually more confusing than it is useful. Skip highlighting on them.

Prior versions performed syntax highlighting on a per-line basis, resulting in confusing or bogus results in multi-line contexts like C/Java’s "/\* … \*/" style comment. Fixed by performing highlighting on the entire file contents, even if only some lines are displayed to meet the user’s context setting.

Vertical tab markers are red, which means they can be hidden against a whitespace error, or deleted region marker. Tabs are now shown as black against these cases.

If a CR ("\r") appears in the middle of a line rather than nestled against an LF as a CRLF pair, its now displayed as a whitespace error, and the line isn’t broken at the CR. This fixes an issue where a mostly CRLF file with a single malformed line ending caused the side-by-side display to render incorrectly (or not at all).

The special gitlink mode inside of a tree points to a commit in the submodule project. We can’t show the content of it inside of the supermodule.

Enter key on a lot of forms did not activate the reasonable default action, e.g. add a reviewer to an existing review. Fixed.

Comment counts in the "history" section of a file viewer were not displayed when the file was renamed between two different patch sets of the same change. Fixed.

The reviewed column header wasn’t displaying with the same style as its siblings. Fixed.

If a change’s current patch set was used as the parent for multiple patch sets of another change, that dependent change showed up more than once in the "Needed By" list. Fixed.

If the owner of the change is the only reviewer and the change can’t be submitted due to a missing dependency, Gerrit failed to send out an email notification. Fixed.

Names or subjects with non-ASCII characters were not quoted properly in the email notification headers. Fixed.

When the email address from line is a generic server identity, there is no way to know who wrote a comment or voted on a change. An additional from line is now injected at the start of the email body to indicate the actual user.

If the session expires and the user clicks "Close" in the session expired popup dialog box, delete the cookie so the user can continue to use the website as an anonymous user.

Certain OpenID URLs were getting double quotes thrown around them after being saved in the last identity cookie on the client. The quotes were loading back into the dialog on a subsequent sign-in attempt, resulting in an error as double quotes aren’t valid in an HTTP URL. Fixed by dropping the quotes if present.

Sometimes users missed the standard error message that indicated no shell was available, due to a thread race condition not always flushing the outgoing buffer. Fixed.

The gerrit approve command previously refused to work on a closed change, but the web UI permitted comments to be added anyway. Fixed by allowing the command line tool to also post comments to closed changes.

Gerrit allowed the invalid HEAD:/refs/for/master push refspec to actually create the branch refs/heads/refs/for/master, which confused any other client trying to push. Fixed.

LDAP usernames no longer are permitted to start with or end with whitespace, removing a common source of typos that lead to users being automatically assigned more than one Gerrit user account.

If httpd.listenUrl ended with / the configuration got botched during init and the site didn’t work as expected. Fixed by correctly handling an optional trailing / in this variable.

Startup errors often went to /dev/null, leaving the admin wondering why the server didn’t launch as expected. Fixed.

Some exceptions were reaching the top of the stack frame without being caught and logged, causing the JRE to print the exception to stderr and then terminate the thread. Since stderr was redirected to /dev/null by gerrit.sh, we usually lost these messages. Exception handlers are now installed to trap and log any uncaught errors.

The gerrit.sh script now waits until the daemon is actually running and able to serve requests before returning to the caller with a successful exit status code. This makes it easier to then start up dependent tasks that need the server to be ready before they can run.

/bin/sh on Debian/Ubuntu systems is dash, not bash. The dash shell does not support the let command.

JAVA_HOME now can be overridden by container.javaHome, as the documentation states.

Upgrades of an existing installation which has not installed the BouncyCastle library shouldn’t be encouraged to download and install the library again. The administrator has already chosen not to use it, we shouldn’t nag them about it.

A bad commentlink.match pattern could cause the change screen to simply not load, with no errors in the server log, and nothing immediately visible on the client. Most bad patterns are now caught during server startup and are reported in the server error_log. Certain failures are caught on the client side, and sent to the server error log over RPC. Bad patterns are simply skipped when logged.

MySQL has a "feature" which prevented the removed_on column from being NULL when we meant for it to be NULL. Fixed by using the MySQL suggested work around, which is non-standard SQL.

init sometimes truncated the WAR file to 0 bytes if it was running from the destination WAR. Fixed by using JGit’s LockFile class which writes to a temporary file and does an atomic rename to finish.

Microsoft Active Directory doesn’t support anonymous binds, and some installations might not be able to create a generic role account for Gerrit Code Review. The new auth.type LDAP_BIND permits Gerrit to authenticate using only the end-user’s credentials, avoiding the need for an anonymous or role account bind.

Microsoft Active Directory wasn’t being detected, because the anonymous bind during server startup failed. Instead the server type is detected during the first user authentication, where we have a valid directory context to query over.

If the server gets upgraded and the user hasn’t reloaded their browser tab since the upgrade, opening a new section of the UI sometimes failed. Fixed by executing an implicit reload in these cases, reducing the number of times a user sees a failure.

Some DNS environments, especially those based on OpenDNS, were failing this test case during a build because the upstream resolver was returning back a bogus record for an invalid domain name. The test was adjusted to use a name that is less likely to be resolved by a broken upstream resolver.

The /become URL now accepts ?user_name=who to authenticate, making it easier to setup a launch configuration to debug a particular user account in development.

SSH URLs using localhost as the hostname are now visible in the web UI, making it easier to copy and paste SSH URLs when debugging fetching of changes.

Launching daemon or init from the classes directory on a case insensitive filesystem like Mac OS X HFS+ or Windows NTFS failed. Fixed.

The CDDL javax.servlet package was replaced by an Apache License 2.0 implementation from the Apache Foundation. The unnecessary OpenXRI package, which was never even included in the distribution, was removed from the license file.