MusicBrainzSummit7
is over. It was fun, and it was a lot of work. Here is what we’ve worked out:
From the whole range of patchy fix to complete rewrite, we have chosen both
extremes:
- FeaturingArtistStyle will be patched very soon.
- Then work will start on MusicBrainz 2.0: a complete rewrite of the
database schema, the moderation system and the user interfaces. This will
take a long time. - In the meantime small improvements and fixes to old nuisances will be
made every 1-2 months.
In detail this means:
1. There will be a patchy fix that remedies the worst aspects of the
FeaturingArtistStyle (aka SG5) very soon (probably early January
06). We have termed this SG5DisasterRelief.
2. To really solve things such as ArtistRoleInheritance,
DontMakeRelationshipClusters,
and MultipleTitleStyle
we will need to redo the complete database schema. We have termed this NadelnderBambus [1].
This is a huge amount of work. It will probably take longer than a year.
However, it will be much quicker to do this in one big separate development
branch, than to add this piece by piece to the current running MusicBrainz
server. At the same time rewriting the schema will alow the developers to
write a complete new abstraction layer that describes edits. This will allow
us to change and later fine-tune the moderation system.
3. We cannot expect all of you to wait over a year while no visible
development happens on MusicBrainz. Luckily there are quite some
half-finished features lying around. These will be implemented one at a time
in intervals of roughly one to two months:
- Gollum’s ArtistPageRedesign.
- A new and shiny Album editor that Gollum has been working on and which
will make edits a lot easier. - Adding Media types to releases like mo is doing on his AttributeTypeTreeRestructure.
- Adding folksonomy tags to MusicBrainz entries like last.fm has. And a utility that will allow you
to generate playlists with these tags. - Labels and Catalog Numbers
- Massive improvements with Picard
- etc. etc.
So you see, you will not be left stranded.
[1] The wiki page does not exist, yet. Also do not ask me
where the name comes from. In English it means “Bamboo shedding its
pines”.
MetaBrainz Blog 
thanks for posting this. and yeah, it was good to be there 🙂
Will the half-finished features be implemented in this order?
No not necessarily; nor is the list exhaustive. What it means, however, is that no big features will be added to MB v1.x except perhaps for a small patch to relieve the worst unicode and i18n aberations. MB 2.0 will be fully multilingual (although the wiki pages do not reflect that concept yet).