Codestriker: collaborative code reviewer / News: Recent posts

* Introduced basic user authentication / authorisation into the
system. If the $admin_users configuration variable is specified
in codestriker.conf, this contains a list of "admin" users.
If defined, admin users are the only ones who can
create/edit/delete projects.

* Created another Subversion post-commit script which is an extension
of the standard commit-email.pl script which ships with Subversion.
The email sent also includes an additional line, which is the URL to
the auto-created topic.... read more

* Ability to create Codestriker topics automatically from a Subversion
commit, via the bin/subversion-post-commit.pl script. Once the
appropriate configuration is set at the start of the file, simply
add it to your Subversion repos/hooks/post-commit file as the
following:

/path/to/codestriker/bin/subversion-post-commit.pl "$REPOS" "$REV"

* "Default to head" option for CVS topic creation was not used when
selected, but when it was unselected. This has now been fixed.
Spotted by mnk26@users.sourceforge.net.... read more

Syntax highlighting support. Appearance of application has been updated. Allow the ability to specify just a filename and a revision number to create a review from a Subversion or Perforce repository. Support for TestDirector as a supported bug tracking system. Support for creating reviews by just entering the bug IDs, and retrieving the data from Scmbug. The edit comment page has been updated to include link back to the associated view topic page. Added support for LXR 0.9.5. Can now comment on any line of any file in the review, not just those that are a part of the diff file.

Hi Codestrikers,

Its been a long time coming, but 1.9.5 will be out quite soon. You
can download 1.9.5rc1 from the usual download site, as linked from
http://codestriker.sf.net. I've pasted in the changelog at the end of
this email.

The pages have been slightly re-designed with a new look and feel,
plus source-code syntax highlighting at long last is available. Check
the codestriker.conf file for more details.... read more

Codestriker 1.9.4 has been released with the following changes since 1.9.3:

* Emit a javascript warning if the external javascript files could
not be loaded. This usually occurs due to apache misconfiguration.

* Allow subversion repositories that communicate using the Subversion
protocol to be specified in @valid_repositories as
'svn://my.subversion.server/repos/product/trunk' rather than
'svn:svn://my.subversion.server/repos/product/trunk'.... read more

* The project list screen now displays for each project, the total
number of open topics, and the total number of topics. Clicking on
the count will go to the topic list screen with the relevant topics
displayed.

* Modified the VSS repository handler so that topics can be created
by either entering in labels or version numbers in the start and
end tag fields when creating a topic. Previously, only labels
were supported.... read more

Latest stable release of Codestriker with unicode support and lots of other goodness:

* Codestriker now works with UTF-8 text, to support unicode character
input for topic titles, descriptions, comment text, and project
names and descriptions. This required making Perl 5.8 as a
pre-requisite, as Perl 5.6 doesn't cut the mustard for unicode
processing.

* Created a new optional configuration parameter $repository_name_map
in codestriker.conf. This allows for a user-defined repository name
to be displayed in the codestriker UI, rather than the full
repository URL. This can be useful for hiding potentially sensitive
username/password information that might be a part of the repository
URL. See the codestriker.conf file for more information.
Submitted by Edwin Fine <edwin.m.fine@verizon.com>.... read more

The first release candidate for the 1.9.2, which contains a lot of new goodies:

* Codestriker now works with UTF-8 text, to support unicode character
input for topic titles, descriptions, comment text, and project
names and descriptions. This required making Perl 5.8 as a
pre-requisite, as Perl 5.6 doesn't cut the mustard for unicode
processing.

* Created a new optional configuration parameter $repository_name_map
in codestriker.conf. This allows for a user-defined repository name
to be displayed in the codestriker UI, rather than the full
repository URL. This can be useful for hiding potentially sensitive
username/password information that might be a part of the repository
URL. See the codestriker.conf file for more information.
Submitted by Edwin Fine <edwin.m.fine@verizon.com>.... read more

* Correct problem introduced in 1.9.0 release where the email address field in the add comment tooltip was not being stored correctly in the Codestriker cookie. For reviewers who have never created a Codestriker topic, the email field not remember the previous value. This has now been corrected.

* When adding a comment via a link from an email, the confirmation screen now contains links to the topic text and topic comments, for convenience.

Now using AJAX for adding comments to a topic rather than a separate browser window for improved useability. Use proper tooltips when hovering over commented lines. Comments can now be made not only at a line level, but at a file-level or topic-level. Closer integration with Bugzilla 2.16 and 2.18 for creating an associated Codestriker topic from a view bug page. The topic list page now has an RSS link. Support for Flyspray bug-tracking system. Minor fixes in the Subversion and Perforce diff parsers. Improved deployment on Win32 systems.

VSS repositories are now supported, both in the generation of topics of already committed code, and by generating the topic text with the ssdiff.pl script for uncommitted code. It is now possible to obsolete topics with a new topic. Codestriker records and displays obsolete links so that follow-up reviews can show what reviews they superseed. Subversion repositories can now be configured with a username and password in the configuration file if authentication is required. A number of other minor bug fixes and enhancements are also included in this release.... read more

Codestriker can now be integrated with CVS post-commit scripts, so that a Codestriker topic can be automatically created for every CVS commit. This can be useful for those teams that do reviews "on a needs basis", or simply as a quick sanity check to ensure that the committed code is valid. A record of all commits will also be in Codestriker's database, providing a convenient searchable commit database. Projects can now optionally have state, such as 'Closed' and 'Deleted'. Specific comment metric counts can be displayed as a column on the topic list screen, plus other UI enhancements.

It is now possible to define a configurable list of issue metrics associated with each comment raised in a review. For example, a 'Type' metric can be defined as having a value of either 'Style', 'Minor', 'Major' or 'Severe'. These values are incorporated into the metrics reporting system. The use of metrics is still optional, and is controlled from the configuration file.

Support for remote CVS repositories using :ext and ssh are now supported. Improved the Clearcase diff parser to handle more corner cases. Updated the Perforce repository support to handle older p4 versions. Updated the Subversion diff parser to handle property set changes. Can now easily create CVS topics given just a single tag and a module parameter in the create topic screen. ... read more

Codestriker now has the ability to view a specific file at a time in the view topic screen, with previous/next file links, to support very large code reviews. There is now ClearCase integration built-in. The topic list screen now can be sorted via the column headers. It is now possible to create Subversion topics by entering in repository revision numbers rather than uploading a diff file. Finally, a number of minor bug fixes have been included in this release.

Fixed metric support so multiple reviewers are handled correctly. Also fixed a bug where the Codestriker time wasn't correctly reported in the metric summary page. The topic creation emails now contain the list of files impacted, and other topic property change emails contain more information as to what had changed. Fixed a bug with LXR integration when the LXR database is password protected. Also modified checksetup.pl so that it is more user-friendly when certain components are missing from the system.

This major release introduces the capability for automatically and manually recording configurable software metrics against your code reviews. It is also possible to generate reports based on these metrics to access the effectiveness of your code reviews. In addition to MySQL and PostgreSQL, Codestriker now supports Oracle and SQL-Server via ODBC. There is also the introduction of Perforce depot integration. Topic properties can now been modified after a topic has been created. Wildcard searching is now supported on the search screen for author, reviewer and cc fields. An audit trail for a topic is now recorded, so that it is possible to see when a topic was created, who has modified it and when that occurred. Codestriker now supports execution under IIS, for Win32 deployments, although Apache can of course be used too.

* If a badly-formatted repository value from codestriker.conf is used
when creating a topic, report this in a user-friendly manner.

* Report an error if a new topic to be created specifies both the
uploaded file and topic tag fields.

* Fixed bug where selecting multiple states in the search screen
reported an input error.

* HTML escaping for the topic title on the topic confirmation screen,
project information on the projects screens were not working
correctly. Most HTML escaping are now performed within the
templates directly using the html_entity filter.... read more

Minor fix: the table of contents links on the view topic page didn't include the brmode parameter, so clicking on a filename link reloaded the whole topic page, which is inconvenient. This reloading behaviour has also been fixed when coming from the topic list or create topic page.

* Fixed bug where created topics for deployments which had projects
disabled were not handled correctly.

* Fixed bug found by Jason Remillard <jremillardshop@yahoo.com> where
emails were being sent for those lines which already had a comment,
but $allow_comment_email was false.

* Added in support for parsing VSS diffs, and retrieving file data from a VSS repository. VSS support is not complete yet, as the script for generated the diff text has not been submitted yet.

The following changes below were from Aaron Kardell akardell@altonaed.com>:

* Modified unidiff parser so that diffs created with
--show-function-line and --show-c-function can e parsed and displayed in the view topic screen.... read more

Major documentation rewrite. Proper installation guide for *NIX and Windows, plus users and hackers guide as well in docbook format, to produce HTML and PDF documentation. There is now online help for each screen. Fixed some minor issues with parsing Subversion diffs. Remove appropriate features from screens if bug tracking or project features are disabled. The Bugzilla database name can now be customised. Ensure delat rows are deleted when a topic is deleted. Example code review topic at http://codestriker.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/codestriker.pl?topic=7063366&action=view

The search topics screen has been enhanced so that filenames within a review can be a part of the search query. Also there is now support for wildcard searches. HTML escaping issues for the list comments screen, and for comment tool-tips have been corrected. Checksetup.pl has been made more user friendly when reporting missing modules, and fixed a minor glitch when an LXR identifier clashed with an HTML entity.

A number of cleanups which has allowed Codestriker to run on a Windows 98 box with Apache + CVS.

* Modified so that Codestriker can run on a Windows box with a local
CVS repository. See the README file for installation details.
The LXR::Run module is now used for increased portability and
reliability under mod_perl.

* Codestriker has been modified slightly to support mod_perl under
Apache 2.X. See the README file for more information. To support
Apache 2.X, cgi-bin/codestriker.pl is now auto-generated by the
checksetup.pl script and is no longer included in the distribution.... read more

Another minor bug fix release for 1.7.1. In this case:

* Compressed output (see $use_compression in codestriker.conf) is now
working correctly.

* Set the project id in the cookie for the ListTopics screen, if the
search is only being conducted over a single project.

* Problem for creating new projects for MySQL fixed.

* Minor fix to the untaint code for start tag, end tag and module
name, to make it accept filename characters. That way, the module
argument can be a filename in a CVS repository, rather than a
module.