After considering all of the options and taking in tons of feedback from our developers, our community and our customers, I’ve finally settled on the following road map for the MusicBrainz server. The plan allows us to follow the release early, release often methodology and should hopefully make most people happy:
TemplateToolkit/Catalyst Release
- Date due: Late March/April
- Non schema change release
- Deployed as beta.musicbrainz.org starting in early march
- 100% features of 2008-11-23 release supported.
- Full Guess Case supported, but no new features
- Many UI improvements, including a generally speedier interface
- Internationalization support: Support will be under the hood, but we may not immediately support new languages.
- Ease of installing mb_server: Use modern tools to draw in more server developers.
- Search improvements: CD Stubs. Possibly: Advanced Relationships, edits
- Closing a whole host of old bugs, introducing many new ones. 🙂
This release doesn’t add many new features, but in general we feel that the user interface experience will improve so much that our end users will be happy with this new release. Also, since we’re keeping to a non-schema change release, we will be able to load this release and let people test with live data on beta.musicbrainz.org. I believe this well get more people to come help us test the new interface and hopefully have a smooth rollout of the new features.
NGS Release
- Date due: To be determined — hopefully sometime this summer
- Major schema change release
- Full NGS object model under the hood.
- Expose ReleaseGroups, if not other new NGS features
- Keep old edit system in place
The major piece of work in this release is the new NGS schema/object model. How we graft the existing edit system on top of the new schema remains to be seen — this task contains many unknowns, which is why it was yanked from the upcoming release. We’ll end up doing more work overall by having the TT/Catalyst release first, but this approach allows us to release early, release often.
NGS Improvements releases (may be one or more releases)
- Date due: weeks after NGS
- Non-schema change releases
- Bug fixes
- Incremental improvements in NGS
- Exposing new NGS features if the NGS release didn’t expose 100% of the new features
Depending on how we work out the NGS release, I can see smaller follow up releases that improve the NGS release or expose more portions of NGS that weren’t previously exposed. Exactly how this shapes up will not become clear until we near the NGS release.
Edit System Rewrite
- Timeframe: To be determined
- Schema change release
- Improve may aspects of our edit system.
Our edit system has been straining under its current load for some time. This release will throw out the edit system entirely and build a new more flexible system that allows the user to change more data with fewer edits and allows the user to find edits easier.
If you have questions on the roadmap, please post them in the comments.
MetaBrainz Blog 
I’m glad we finally have a roadmap posted, I’ve been wondering for a while what kind of time frame TT would have.
Now that I know TT is right around the corner I can hardly wait to start using it with live data on beta!
I just hope that the edit system can be rewritten as soon as possible.
The feature I’m most interested in is having track transliterations/translations be stored in the same place as the original name, instead of separately linked with a pseudo-release AR. Am I right in thinking this is part of NGS? If so, can I ask where on the priority queue it is and when I might see it (if NGS isn’t exposed all at once)?
However long it takes, many, many thanks for an awesome system!
Yay, a plan! Exciting 🙂
@dolphinling
Pretty much my sentiments as well. I look forward for the day when we don’t have to duplicate data between officials and pseudos.
And I also look forward to the day when we can lump multidisc releases under one heading (ReleaseGroups?) and not duplicate album relationships on those anymore either.
Good times ahead my friends.