2008: Support to automatically produce a set of findings, not necessarily in diffs between versions

plj***@gmai***** (Google Code) (Is this you? Claim this profile.)
March 5, 2011 
http://reviews.reviewboard.org/


What version are you running?
ReviewBoard 1.5.3

What's the URL of the page this enhancement relates to, if any?
???

Describe the enhancement and the motivation for it.
Wish to post a review request based on compiler warnings rather than diffs between versions. This is for applying review board to existing code and to clean it up.

What operating system are you using? What browser?
Linux server for ReviewBoard, browser currently Firefox

Please provide any additional information below.
In general, we would like to be able to produce a review request and automatically create a set of findings in the code based on some tool. However, we have not discovered, or found, a way to do this without trying to create diffs and automatically produce diff comments (findings) in the code.

So we created a script that produces a "fake" diff-file, it simply states there is a difference on each line our automatic tool have identified an issue in the code. The base revision is the latest revision and the compared version is stated to be working copy (for SVN). In order not to make this too complicated we used an equivalent of -U 0 for the diff unifying lines, 0 lines, only the "diffing" line is stated.

When we upload this diff to the review request, either with post-review in RBTools or in the Web Interface, the server simply stalls and no response is given.

A later issue still unresolved is to automatically populate the diff locations  with comments, given from the automated code analyzer.

We simply wish for the feature of submit findings in the code, without having a diff in the code.  This currently seems not possible.

If there is a way to do this it would be great and please let us know.
chipx86
#1 chipx86 
You're basically looking for Review Board to do something it doesn't do and won't do by itself. I can definitely see some future tool knowing how to analyze diffs on Review Board and making automated comments, but it will never be Review Board doing it.

I'm not quite sure I understand what your script does, but the diff file generated *must* contain valid information to fetch the file in the repository, and *must* apply. If it doesn't, Review Board won't work with it.

I think it'd be awesome for someone to write a tool that does what you're looking to do, but it's not something we're going to have any time for, and falls a bit outside the scope of the project.
  • +WontFix