Release notes for Gerrit 2.1.5

The commit message of a change can now be commented on inline, and even compared between patch sets, just like any other file contents. The message is presented as a magical file called Commit Message, in the first row of every change.

Any user who can abandon a change (the change owner, project owner, or any site administrator) can now restore the change from Abandoned status back to Review in Progress.

The new download section in gerrit.config controls how the patch set download links are presented in the web UI. Administrators can use this section to enable repo download, git://, or to disable http:// style URLs. This section replaces the older repo.showDownloadCommand.

A diffstat is shown for each file, summarizing the size of the change on that file in terms of number of lines added or deleted.

After the file listing, a summary totaling the number of files changed, lines added, and lines removed is displayed. This may help reviewers to get a quick estimation on the time required for them to review the change.

Keyboard shortcuts didn’t work properly on modern WebKit browsers like Chrome and Safari. We kept trying to blame this on the browser, but it was Gerrit Code Review at fault. The UI was using the wrong listener type to receive keyboard events in comment editors. Fixed.

Previously the u key on a change page was hardcoded to take the user to their own dashboard. However, if they arrived at the change through a query such as is:starred status:open, this was quite annoying, as the query had to be started over again to move to the next matching change. Now the u key goes back to the query results.

The user’s syntax coloring preference was always ignored in the unified view, even though the side-by-side view honored it. Fixed.

The Depends On and Needed By tables on a change page did not show the current user’s star settings, even though the star icon is present and will toggle the user’s starred flag for that change. Fixed.

Branch owners could not add exclusive ACLs within their branch namespace. This was caused by the server trying to match the leading - entered by the branch administrator against patterns that did not contain -, and therefore always failed. Fixed by removing the magical - from the proposed new specification before testing the access rights.

The dk.brics.automaton package that is used to handle regular expressions on branch access patterns supports @ to mean "any string". We don’t want that behavior. Fixed by disabling the optional features of dk.brics.automaton, thereby making @ mean a literal @ sign as expected.

Upload access (aka Read +2) did not inherit properly from the parent project (e.g. -- All Projects --) if there was any branch level Read access control within the local project. This was a coding bug which failed to consider the project inheritance if any branch (not just the one being uploaded to) denied upload access.

Some hooks crashed inside of the server during invocation because the gerrit.canonicalWebUrl variable wasn’t configured, and the hook was started out of an SSH or background thread context, so the URL couldn’t be assumed from the current request. The bug was worked around by not passing the \--change-url flag in these cases. Administrators whose hooks always need the flag should configure gerrit.canonicalWebUrl.

Submitting a change with a missing dependency to a new branch resulted in a NullPointerException in the server, because the server tried to create the branch anyway, even though there was no commit ready because one or more dependencies were missing. Fixed.

Sending email notifications crashed with NullPointerException if the change contained a deleted file and one or more users had a project watch on that project using a file:^ pattern in their filter. Fixed.

A push refspec of refs/heads/\* in replication.config is now supported as a shorthand notation for refs/heads/\*:refs/heads/\*.

The topic was cleared if a replacement patch set was uploaded without the topic name. The topic is now left as-is during replacement if no new topic was supplied. If a new topic is supplied, it is changed to match the new topic given.

gitweb.cgi accepts either ; or & between parameters, but Gerrit Code Review was only accepting the ; syntax. Fixed to support both.