Hi Leonel,
On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 4:20 AM, Leonel Togniolli tognio...@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
I recently started looking into Review Board and I'm about to give it a try
with my team. A couple questions before I start:
It appears to be possible as an unauthenticated user to see all review
quests and the diffs. I need to prevent that and only let logged in users to
do so. A setting I missed somewhere?
Yes. Admin UI - Settings - Authentication - Allow anonymous access
(or something like that).
In 1.6, you'll have more ability to have fine-grained permissions on
groups and repositories.
Second, it appears client and server need a live connection to the SCM
server. I'm using SVN in case that makes a difference. This is inadequate to
me because we are in a different physical network than our server and reach
it through on-demand VPN.
This is a requirement. Review Board grabs the files from the SCM and
patches them in order to get the complete original and new files, and
then performs a side-by-side diff. This won't change. Best I can
recommend is coming up with some more persistent tunnel, or moving
where the Review Board server lives.
It seems to me that I have all the need, in the client, to create the review
request. SVN stores the original files, which are used to generate the diffs
of uncommitted changes, which are uploaded to the server and displayed. This
is for pre-commit reviews, of course. Otherwise either the client or the
server would need to reach it and fetch the requested revisions (I'd prefer
the client but can't be picky about that). Am I missing something?
The reason why we don't have the client provide the complete files is
partially for storage reasons. It's way cheaper to store diffs instead
of full files. Otherwise, the databases would absolutely balloon up in
size. As an example, I know a Review Board server in use at one
company that has a database of 19GB, 18GB of which are the diffs for
the hundreds of thousands of review requests (and iterations on them).
Now, if we were to put up entire files, that would grow significantly,
by 10x or more, I'd have to imagine.
Having access to the files from the SCM server gives us flexibility in
how we operate. There was some work being done for Git support where
Review Board could monitor a branch and tell the user if there have
been changes to the branch since the review request. There's a feature
request filed for an extension down the road that could tell you if
the patch still applies to the tip of the tree.
I hope that explains well enough why we're sticking with the method
we're currently using. There are plans for something to help offload
some of this work (interacting with repositories, dealing with the
diff file storage), but the general model won't change.
Otherwise, ReviewBoard looks great. Installation was a little bumpy (on
windows with apache, mysql) but I figured things out without too much
trouble. Looking forward to use it for real.
Windows installs can be tricky. It's far, far easier to install on
Linux. We've had some work done on a Windows installer, which may land
in 1.6, though.
Christian
--
Christian Hammond - chip...@chipx86.com
Review Board - http://www.reviewboard.org
VMware, Inc. - http://www.vmware.com
--
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http://www.reviewboard.org/donate/
Happy user? Let us know at http://www.reviewboard.org/users/
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