Release notes for Gerrit 2.1.4

The search box now implements a wide range of operators and boolean expressions, permitting complex queries such as is:open CodeReview>=1 (has:draft OR is:starred) to locate open changes that have been code reviewed, but still have unpublished drafts or were starred by the current user. The full range of supported operators is documented in the user guide.

All current change lists have been reimplemented using query operators, so selecting All open changes actually performs the query is:open. This is to help end-users learn the different operators that are supported, and simplifies the internal implementation considerably by removing redundant code.

Changes can be tagged with a topic name during upload. To add the tag query when pushing to branch master, use git push URL HEAD:refs/for/master/query. To add a topic name with repo upload use the -t command line flag. Topic names are displayed next to the branch name in the web UI, and can be searched for with the topic: query operator.

The query operator is:watched matches changes matching the user’s watched project list, and a new menu item was added under the My menu to select open changes matching these watched projects.

Formatting options at the top of a side-by-side or unified diff page are now remembered by saving the current preferences into the user’s account whenever Update is clicked.

More keyboard bindings have been added, reducing the need to switch to the mouse while navigating through a change and performing a review.

New buttons permit opening all modified files of a change into new windows or tabs.

The Change-Id field in the upper left side of a change now support to copy "Change-Id: I…." onto the clipboard, making it easier to paste into a commit message.

The user who causes a notification to be sent is no longer CC’d on the email when it is sent. This reduces the number of messages sent to a user, but can be re-enabled through a checkbox in the Settings > Preferences panel.

Adding the magic \-- All Projects \-- to the watched project list permits the user to be notified of any change occurring in any project. Project specific entries override the notification settings for all projects.

In addition to watching a project, users can register a query string to match specific changes, reducing notifications to be a smaller subset of the changes that occur in a project.

The file:^path operator can be used in a watch filter to receive notifications only when files matching the regular expression are modified by the change.

New fields in the email footer provide additional detail, enabling better filtering and classification of messages.

References in an access rule can now be specified by regular expression by prefixing the reference name with ^.

Adding $\{username\} into a reference causes the current username to be inserted at that position. When combined with the Push Branch permission this creates a per-user branch namespace feature, giving each user their own "sandbox" to push changes to.

Groups can now be created over SSH by administrators using the gerrit create-group command.

Adding password authentication over SSH turned out to be a major mistake. Users primarily use SSH public keys, and the password prompt just got in the way or confused them. Password support has been removed from the SSH server.

Once a username has been selected for a user account, it cannot be modified by the user.

Web sessions are now persistent for the cache.web_sessions.maxAge setting, rather than expiring when the browser closes. (Previously sessions expired when the browser exited.)

Additional change fields are now exported as part of the stream-events output.

Queries to lookup change information can be executed over SSH through the gerrit query command, with results output in either human readable text or machine readable JSON. Change queries can also be run over HTTP with the /query?q=<query>&format=JSON URL. Both interfaces are intended for automated tools.

Gerrit no longer requires git in the PATH; differences are now constructed in pure Java code. Remote repository initialization over SSH still requires git on the remote host’s PATH.

Updated JGit to 0.8.4.89-ge2f5716, log4j to 1.2.16, GWT to 2.0.4, sfl4j to 1.6.1, easymock to 3.0, JUnit to 4.8.1.

Deleting a branch now presents a confirmation dialog to give the user a second chance to abort the destructive operation.

The GWT compiler started to define symbols in the same namespace as the prettify syntax highlighting library. We moved the prettify library into its own iframe so it has a different JavaScript namespace in the browser.

There was no obvious way to leave the sign-in dialog. Fixed.

Keyboard navigation to standard links like Google Accounts wasn’t supported. Fixed.

A bug was introduced in 2.1.3 that caused a server 503 error when a fetch/pull/clone or push request timed out. Fixed.