Author: ruaok

Privacy policy inconsistencies

Recently we’ve received two bug reports that point out two inconsistencies in our privacy policy:

  • MBS-5708: It’s not possible to disable the display of cover art but the privacy policy claims it is. There are two possible options for fixing this; fix the privacy policy or make a new preference. Which would you prefer?
  • MBS-5709: Inclusion of Google Analytics is in violation of the privacy policy. This one is more tricky, since we link to other third parties (archive.org, gravatar, captcha) that are also not mentioned in the policy. And changing the policy for each time we add a new third party becomes cumbersome. No clear solutions have formed around this issue, so we would like your feedback on this.

If you care about our privacy policy, please take a moment to read these bugs and comment on them. Thanks!

7digital & The Echo Nest have become MusicBrainz customers

I’m pleased to announce that 7digital and The Echo Nest have become our latest customers!

7digital enables a lot of digital music stores and provides a lot of services for mobile operators. 7digital has relationships with many labels and thus faces complex metadata issues. I’m quite pleased that 7digital has chosen to partner with MusicBrainz to fix these metadata issues.

The Echo Nest provides tons of digital music services and is a driving force behind Music Hack Days here in the States. The Echo Nest also created project Rosetta Stone, a service that translates to/from MusicBrainz IDs from/to other ID spaces like the Echo Nest IDs or Rdio IDs.

Welcome to the MusicBrainz ecosystem!

A sad day for the Internet: RIP Aaron Swartz

As you’ve probably seen around the net today, Aaron Swartz, Internet Hero has committed suicide.

Aaron Swartz has spent most of life working to improve the Internet and to preserve freedom on the net. Many people are speaking to his awesome accomplishments in the last 10 years of his life, but I’d like to take a minute and reflect on his earlier years.

I was one of the fortunate people who met Aaron when he was still 15 — we first met up in Washington DC for O’Reilly’s P2P conference. Since he was a minor, his mom was accompanying him. Never mind that she had a broken leg at the time — she was so dedicated to her son that she traveled with him to allow him to participate in things that most minors couldn’t even imagine.

Before I met him in person, Aaron was an active contributor to MusicBrainz. When I started my first mis-guided attempts to create an RDF based web-service, he worked with me to improve the schema. He helped me understand RDF (damn that RDF spec!) and helped me fix the schema until it actually worked properly. Aaron was always looking for new and interesting things to do, so once his mission with MusicBrainz was done, he moved on to bigger and better things. And the things he did — simply amazing that one person can accomplish so much in so little time.

Aaron and I shared one passion — making data open and accessible. His means were always more aggressive than mine; he often chose the faster, more risky approach. I usually favor the slow-and-steady-will-win approach. Regardless, the events that led up to his suicide leave me deeply unsettled about the current state of affairs.

Aaron, thank you for being the instigator, shit-stirrer, advocate and dissident you were. I appreciate everything you’ve done during your short stay here in this troubled planet. May your next journey be more peaceful!

Thank you to Cory, Larry and Brewster for your kind words.

UPDATE: Here is a link to the paper Aaron wrote about MusicBrainz.

Virtual Machine for 2012-10-15 release now available

If you’ve been waiting for the VM for the 2012-10-15 version, your wait is over! I’ve updated the Server Setup page with the links to the latest VM. As usual it contains a replicated database that can easily catch up to the latest data.

Grab yours now and start replicating!

UPDATE: This virtual machine is broken — we’ll work to get a new one up soon.

2012-10-15 migration on postgres 8.4 is broken

Our users have reported a bug where migrating a slave DB on postgres 8.4 results in this error:

ERROR: syntax error at or near “ORDER”
LINE 6: SELECT array_agg(artist_credit ORDER BY artist_credit AS…

If you are 8.4 please wait on your migration — we’re hoping to have a workaround ready today. If you need to get this fixed sooner, moving to postgres 9.x or importing the 2012-10-17 data dump would solve this problem.

Sorry for the troubles!

Updating MusicBrainz slave instances for 2012-10-15

If you have a replicated instance of MusicBrainz, please follow these instructions to get your server running on the new schema:

  1. Take down the web server running MusicBrainz, if you’re running a web server.
  2. Turn off cron jobs if you are automatically updating the database via cron jobs.
  3. Make sure your REPLICATION_TYPE setting is RT_SLAVE
  4. Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-2012-10-15-schema-change
  5. Run carton install --deployment to install any new perl modules.
  6. Run carton exec -- ./upgrade.sh from the top of the source directory.
  7. Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 16 in lib/DBDefs.pm
  8. Turn cron jobs back on, if needed.
  9. Restart the MusicBrainz web server, if needed.

This upgrade requires quite a bit of disk-space to execute; your slave may run into trouble if there is less than 10Gb of disk space free. If you’re on a disk space constrained machine, you may want to consider re-importing the data rather than upgrading in place. The next data dump should be available in about 14-16 hours from now.

Schema change release 2012-10-15

We just finished the latest schema change release. Please stay tuned for instructions on how to upgrade your MusicBrainz slave instances.

This release features work from Nikki, Navap, Bitmap, Freso and the MusicBrainz developers. Thanks for your work everyone! The following changes were included in this release:

Bug

  • [MBS-240] – Attached files not downloading properly in transcluded page
  • [MBS-3610] – Ratings : 502 Bad Gateway
  • [MBS-3853] – Annotation history page allows the same version to be selected for both Old and New
  • [MBS-3963] – Edit search "artist in my subscription" should hide the artist input field
  • [MBS-4033] – Offered and installed search plugin name mismatch
  • [MBS-4206] – Whitespace isn’t removed from the last join phrase
  • [MBS-4220] – Artists shown to last 0 days if begin year = end year
  • [MBS-4268] – "{age} ago" does not work for all languages
  • [MBS-4747] – Wrong diff or wrong edit allowed for an URL
  • [MBS-4812] – Empty "Remove release label" edit was entered
  • [MBS-4929] – Some fields on user’s "Open edits" page are duplicating while merging works
  • [MBS-4978] – Release merges with strategy "Merge mediums and recordings" don’t show up on the affected recordings’ open edits list.
  • [MBS-5047] – Changing secondary RG types is an autoedit for all users
  • [MBS-5051] – Empty artists with pending edits still get the « will be removed automatically » warning
  • [MBS-5090] – Some entities are marked as having pending edits when they don’t
  • [MBS-5177] – Editors can edit after removing their email address
  • [MBS-5253] – Table release_group_secondary_type_join misses a created field
  • [MBS-5264] – Track Parser results in edits changing durations on tracks in mediums with discids in some cases
  • [MBS-5306] – Internal server error when searching for edits by artist country and relationship type
  • [MBS-5321] – Some relationship editor tests are failing.
  • [MBS-5329] – Relationship editor breaks when using translations
  • [MBS-5330] – Medium formats untranslated on release pages and in release editor
  • [MBS-5331] – Edit note label is cut off when translated
  • [MBS-5332] – Last updated timestamp is missing on some details pages
  • [MBS-5333] – cover art types translate incorrectly
  • [MBS-5336] – Relationships get double-translated
  • [MBS-5342] – .pot files are generated with the ‘perl-format’ po flag when they are not being passed to sprintf
  • [MBS-5344] – Edits display page, for an add cover art edit, for a removed release, has invalid link
  • [MBS-5346] – TuneCore blocking blocks valid ISRCs
  • [MBS-5357] – Translations creeping into edit info
  • [MBS-5368] – Changing the link type in the relationship editor causes the dialog to jump
  • [MBS-5372] – AR editor: paste should detect entity type
  • [MBS-5377] – MediaWiki upgrade broke WikiDoc redirects
  • [MBS-5382] – AR editor: "part of" ARs are displayed backwards
  • [MBS-5384] – Relationship editor: track artists only shown when AC has different number of artists
  • [MBS-5385] – Relationship editor shouldn’t merge relationships with different dates
  • [MBS-5390] – Relationship editor isn’t loading related works for some recordings
  • [MBS-5391] – Relationship editor doesn’t support the "ended" checkbox
  • [MBS-5392] – Relationship editor should display dates consistent with the rest of the site
  • [MBS-5396] – relationship editor changes to MB.utility.keys cause it to die on null
  • [MBS-5406] – "Subscriptions" editor tab shows 3 empty <li> inside <ul> between « jesus2099 is subscribed to: » and p.pageselector
  • [MBS-5412] – Some statistics tabs have partially-untranslated headers
  • [MBS-5413] – e.g. "Artist-Artist" and "Artist-Artist relationships" not translating correctly on /statistics/relationships
  • [MBS-5414] – Javascript tests no longer run in older versions of Opera
  • [MBS-5415] – "Types:" (under cover art) should often be in singular
  • [MBS-5417] – WikiDocs: Prevent access to File and Image namespace
  • [MBS-5419] – Chrome frame wasn’t removed completely/properly
  • [MBS-5425] – Some ModBot edit notes end up stored translated

Improvement

  • [MBS-1226] – Address verification email should include the client’s IP address
  • [MBS-1530] – More space/sections on the add disc id page
  • [MBS-1789] – No way to compare discid track length against tracklist length
  • [MBS-2449] – Search page should say when it was last updated
  • [MBS-2492] – Don’t show quality levels in edit documentation where they don’t apply
  • [MBS-2543] – Make the dash at the end of /cdtoc/ and /cdstub/ URLs optional
  • [MBS-2650] – After adding a relationship, go to the overview tab
  • [MBS-2717] – User’s ratings page should be paginated
  • [MBS-3606] – Matched CD TOC page should have a link to the disc id
  • [MBS-3791] – Drop Description from URLs
  • [MBS-4104] – Show release merges under all track/recording artists
  • [MBS-4405] – Report: Artists that may be persons shoudn’t show obvious groups
  • [MBS-4690] – Include links to all image sizes
  • [MBS-5099] – Make release/work language clickable
  • [MBS-5236] – Add stats for work types
  • [MBS-5279] – Try to avoid duplicating links in the sidebar
  • [MBS-5285] – Add NOT NULL constraints to disambiguation & join phrase column
  • [MBS-5290] – CAA replication
  • [MBS-5350] – Add a way to check # of open edits and edits entered in the last day
  • [MBS-5352] – /doc/Edit_Types/38 and similar should link to the documentation.
  • [MBS-5362] – Add cleanup and autoselect for iTunes links
  • [MBS-5364] – Ask the user to confirm navigation away from the relationship editor (mainly for backspace)
  • [MBS-5365] – In the relationship editor, pressing enter while focused in the entity lookup should add the relationship
  • [MBS-5366] – Make it easier to reuse artists in the relationship editor
  • [MBS-5371] – Don’t show ModBot as a limited user
  • [MBS-5375] – Remove whitespace above doctype declaration
  • [MBS-5376] – Add artist credit description
  • [MBS-5404] – Improve the relationship editor’s multiselect plugin

New Feature

  • [MBS-5320] – All data dumps should be signed by MusicBrainz
  • [MBS-5324] – Relationship editor should allow using auto-editor privileges
  • [MBS-5363] – Allow adding/editing release group relationships in the relationship editor

Task

  • [MBS-5182] – Add final controlled_for_whitespace checks
  • [MBS-5289] – Finish/merge log statistic features
  • [MBS-5291] – Move existing timeline stats into its own schema
  • [MBS-5316] – Remove PGOPTIONS/search_path from ./admin/psql
  • [MBS-5354] – Remove drastically out-of-sequence cover art images
  • [MBS-5355] – Remove depedency on Function::Parameters
  • [MBS-5374] – Commit MB logo into repo

The Git commit SHA for this release is 5bd71d211dceb25a7a0d545a14cb3273e3e89f19, tag is v-2012-10-15-schema-change.