Release notes for Gerrit 2.1.7

Git notes are automatically added to the refs/notes/review.

Entering a word with no operator (for example gerrit) will be expanded to all projects whose names contain the string gerrit.

New search predicates ownerin:'GROUP' and reviewerin:'GROUP' search for changes whose owner or that has a reviewer in (or not in if prefixed with -) the specified group.

Change lists (such as from a search result, or in a user’s dashboard) can now optionally display the name of the reviewer or verifier who gave the score being shown in the summary column. This is an optional per-user preference that can be enabled in the Settings screen.

Clicking "Revert Change" creates a new change with the inverse of the submitted patch set ready for review and submission. This makes it easy to undo a build-breaking change right from the web UI.

Change pages now offer a selection box, "Old Version History", to compare patch sets against one another and view only the files that differ between two patch sets. This new feature can speed up re-reviewing a change.

Site administrators can configure a different theme in gerrit.config for the signed-in and signed-out states, making it more obvious to site users they are currently signed-in (or not).

This mirrors the data shown in the Commit Message file, making it easy to identify the parent(s) of the commit without opening up the Commit Message or gitweb.

The Java based SSH key loading applet is no longer included as part of the Gerrit Code Review interface. Users need to copy and paste their SSH public key files by hand.

Most common error messages are now described in detail in the documentation under User Guide, Error Messages. Each error is explained, along with possible courses of action for an end-user to resolve the issue.

New gerrit.config variable sendemail.importance can be set to high or low to classify outgoing mail, and sendemail.expiryDays can be set to suggest clients should automatically expire or expunge messages this many days after being sent.

A new group option permits the group to be visible to all users, rather than just its members. Some sites may find this useful for a project owners group, to help users contact the relevant folks.

A new group option causes all users who are a member of that group to only send email notifications to change authors, excluding reviewers and watchers. This can be useful for automated build and testing users to reduce the amount of email sent to reviewers.

Groups that are not visible to a user are not shown as suggestions in contexts where a group name completion is supported. The previously mentioned make group visible to all users flag can be used on a per-group basis to expose groups to everyone.

The new suggest.accounts configuration variable in gerrit.config can control how suggestions for users are offered.

Groups can now be a member of another group, users are automatically a member of the transitive closure of their group membership.

The new READ +3 permission is required to upload merge commits. Users with only READ +2 permission may upload new changes, but not merges. The schema upgrade will automatically convert any current READ +2 access lines to be READ +3 to maintain prior behavior.

This checkbox enables showing or hiding the lines that are inherited from the parent project. This makes it easier to find the rules that are unique to the project being viewed.

Username requirements are relaxed to permit single letter usernames.

Site administrators can now set auth.cookieSecure to request browsers only send the cookie over https:// connections, preventing eavesdropping.

Site administrators can now set auth.cookiePath to override the path used for the authentication cookie, which may be necessary if a reverse proxy maps requests to the managed gitweb.

Replication remotes can be configured with remote.name.adminUrl to indicate an SSH path for repository creation that is different from the normal push URL in remote.name.url. The adminUrl can be used by Gerrit to create a new repository when the normal URL is a non-SSH URL, such as git:// or http://.

Replication can now be performed over an authenticated smart HTTP transport, in addition to anonymous Git and authenticated SSH.

The internal gitweb served from /gitweb can now appear to be from a different URL by using a reverse proxy that does URL rewriting.

Updated H2 Database to 1.2.147, PostgreSQL JDBC Client to 9.0-801, openid4java to 0.9.6, ANTLR to 3.2, GWT to 2.1.1, JSch to 0.1.44, Gson to 1.6, Apache Commons Net to 2.2, Apache Commons Pool to 1.5.5, JGit to 0.12.1.53-g5ec4977, MINA SSHD to 0.5.1-r1095809.

A bug in JGit lead to the side-by-side view displaying wrong and confusing output of modified lines. This bug also caused some automatic merges to be carried out incorrectly, usually resulting in compile failures. Fixed.

Previously a negative or zero value in the number of columns field would break the user’s account and prevent them from viewing any file differences through the web UI. Values less than 1 are now rejected, and existing broken accounts will work again by resetting to a sane column count.

In the project’s "Branches" tab symbolic references like HEAD always displayed the wrong target name. Fixed to display the target name of the reference.

Deleting the target of a symbolic reference causes the symbolic to become dangling, and it becomes useless.

Attempting to browse a group that does not exist or that is not visible to the current user now displays a proper error message, instead of a scary generic "Application Error, Server Error".

Some email was sent as Anonymous Coward, even when the user had a configured name and email address. Fixed.

When sending out new changes for review, Gerrit automatically tries to address the project owners on the To line of the outgoing message. This sometimes included the owner of a branch. Fixed.

With Gerrit 2.1.6, clients started to push possibly hundreds of megabytes for what should be a tiny patch set changing 1 line of 1 file. This large push was caused by the server advancing ahead of the client (e.g. due to another change being submitted) and the client not having fetched the new version. Fixed by adding some recent history to the advertisement so that clients don’t have to upload the entire project for a small change.

If multiple new commits are uploaded to a refs/for/ branch and they have the same Change-Id, the push is now rejected. Within a project, the Change-Id should be unique and users should either squash the commits, or modify them to use unique Change-Ids.

Changes are automatically closed during direct push to branch only if the Change-Id line matches and the branch name matches. Previously changes were closed automatically if only the Change-Id matched, making it difficult to cherry-pick changes across branches.

If a repository stores disconnected history graphs on different branches, changes may only be pushed to the correct branch.

Ensure Change-Ids aren’t incorrectly used, even if the project does not require them to be present. Previously some validity checks were only performed if the project required Change-Id lines.

Change-Ids are not required when directly pushing to a branch. This permits projects that normally require Change-Ids to still perform direct branch pushes for updates received from an upstream project that does not use Change-Ids.

Severely malformed Change-Id lines were previously accepted by the server. These are now rejected.

If a commit with a Change-Id was pushed, and the corresponding change was already closed, the server incorrectly errored out with "No new changes". Now it reports the change is closed and does not accept a new patch set.

Instead of saying change not found when pushing to a commit to a refs/changes/NNNN reference that belongs in another project, the error now indicates the change belongs to another project.

If the commit message is badly formatted Gerrit displays an error message to the client. This message has been extended to offer suggestions on how to correct the commit message.

If a change state corrupt error is reported to a client, there was no mention if it on the server error log. Now it is reported so the site administrator also knows about it.

Previously branch updates were not being recorded in the native Git reflogs ($GIT_DIR/logs/refs/heads) due to a misconfiguration on new projects created by gerrit create-project. Fixed.

An invalid username is now always reported in UTF-8.

Conditional installation is needed to install Gerrit on PostgreSQL 9.