Category: Community

Reminder: MusicBrainz hack weekend starts this Friday!

I wanted to remind everyone that we’re having our first online MusicBrainz hack weekend starting this Friday. If you’re interested in participating, please be in the #musicbrainz-devel channel on Freenode on Friday, 17 August, 1900 UTC. We’re going to have quick coordination meeting at that time and see who wants to work on what projects. Then we’re going to hack through the weekend and see how much fun stuff we can build for MusicBrainz.

For more information, pleasee see our wiki page and the original blog post.

Announcing the first MusicBrainz Hack Weekend

Hi everyone!

It’s with a lot of excitement that I can announce that the first MusicBrainz Worldwide/Remote Hack Weekend has been confirmed! We will spend from 2012-08-17 until 2012-08-19 getting as many people together as we can to hack on some fun new features for MusicBrainz, or use MusicBrainz data in interesting ways.

You can find all the details including proposed ideas at:

http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Hack_Weekend

When

The first official MusicBrainz hack weekend will take place between 2012-08-17 and 2012-08-19.

Where

The main event will be taking place in the #musicbrainz-devel IRC channel on irc.freenode.org. We also encourage local people to get together and work on things in person if possible. If you’re interested in that, check the wiki page for information about people who are local to you.

Who

Everyone! The hack weekend is not just for programmers, we’ll be sure to need testers, people to help brainstorm, people to help with documentation and writing, people to help with HTML, and inevitably more on the day.

Ideas

We’ve already got a few ideas on the wiki page, but the more the merrier! Even if you don’t think you can make the hack weekend, put your ideas down and maybe someone will pick them up.

I’m really looking forward to this, and I hope you’ll join us!

Please Help Us Sanity Check More Removals

ocharles has just finished work on MBS-2547 which will result in empty labels and empty release groups also being deleted as part of our daily clean up jobs, just like empty artists are currently deleted. As we’ve never cleaned up empty labels or release groups in the past, there is quite a bit of data that will be deleted in the first run. Before we run this, we would like to share it with the community in case any of this data is important.

The cleanup algorithm is mostly the same as it is for artists. Labels and release groups will only be deleted if:

  • They have existed for more than 24 hours
  • They have no open edits, or open edits that show up in their edit history
  • They have no relationships
  • They have no releases

Here are the lists of labels and release groups that would be removed, if we were to run the script right now:

If you do not want a label or release group to be deleted, please add relationships, as you would with artists or works.

Our forums are back!

Our forums were compromised a while ago and we had to undergo massive yak shaving in order to set up a new home for our forums. Hosting many different types of software on one server makes that server hard to administer — we felt that the proper solution was to create a Virtual server host and give each type of software a new Linux instance to live in. We started with the forums, but we’re going to be moving a lot more stuff over to this virtual host in the coming weeks/months. Hopefully we can update our blog and our wiki in this process.

In any case, the forums are back online and running with the old posts, but the latest version of PunBB. In the move we lost our customized MusicBrainz theme for PunBB — if someone feels strongly about having the theme, please take a look at the PunBB docs and create a new theme. I’ll be glad to install that new theme on our server.

Thanks and sorry the forums were offline for so long!

Preparing for the May 15th schema change release

For our last schema change release we had a ton of issues around which tickets we should address and which ones were properly defined for us to work on. I’d like to make this a lot more clear for the next go round; here is what we’re going to do:

Starting today and for the next two weeks, we’re going to seek people to be the champion (sponsor) of a ticket. If you feel strongly about a schema change ticket getting taken care of, you should consider championing this ticket. Once you’ve decided to do adopt a ticket, you should assign the ticket to yourself.

Then, over the next two weeks it will be up to you to do the following:

  1. Derive consensus around the core concept of the ticket. If you go through the process of working up a ticket, but no one agrees with what you’re proposing, you’ve wasted your time. Make sure that you get buy in from others in the community. For instance, if Nikki doesn’t like it, chances are its not going to fly. 🙂
  2. Ensure that the ticket clearly states what needs to be done to implement the ticket. The ticket should essentially become or link to a requirements document. This requirements document should explain what the new feature should do. It should not explain how it should be done — we should leave the how to our developers who are going to implement the feature.
  3. Provide as much supporting documentation as you can. Mock-ups for UIs are deeply appreciated (even if they delve into the how realm of things) and very useful for meaningfully discussing these tickets.
  4. Have the ticket reviewed by a developer for clarity and completeness, then address any issues said developer may raise.

On 19 March, we’re going to look at the list of tickets that people have taken on and choose the ones that are clear enough to move forward. If you’ve done all the work outlined above, the chances are good that your ticket will be chosen to move forward. If your ticket is chosen to move forward, there will be more questions that the developers will raise — hopefully those can be tackled in the space of a week. After that we will take all of the well defined tickets and schedule them for implementation. All the other tickets that are not clear to implement will be rejected and will have to make another pass though this process in the autumn.

If you’re still interested, here is the list of schema change tickets that should be considered for this.

New Style Leader and Updated Proposal Process

Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok) is replacing Kuno Woudt (warp) as style leader. This will allow Kuno to fully concentrate on development, and also allow our other style leader Nikki to dedicate more of her time to testing changes and make it less likely for us to have botched releases.

We are also updating the proposal process, and tying it to the Jira tracker, to avoid the manual updating of the proposal table and problems with two people using the same proposal number by mistake. The updated system is at Proposals – the huge table there has been moved to Proposals/History

Mini-Summit Session Notes

Yesterday we held our mini-summit in London to great success. The MusicBrainz team huddled up in a hotel last night and finished writing up notes of everything we covered, and you can now have a look at them on the wiki at MusicBrainz Summit/2012-Mini_Summit/Notes. In general, we provided an update of what’s been happening at MusicBrainz, what’s coming up in the future, and heard how each company are using MusicBrainz. Discussions have started with respect to classical support, but don’t expect anything concrete any time soon!

Many thanks to everyone who came along to this summit and helped make it work – it was great seeing you all!

London pub gathering

On Monday we’re having the MusicBrainz mini-summit in London. Following the summit, starting at 6pm, we’re going to move to the Tower Tavern to have a pint of beer (or a few).

While the summit is open to people who have registered ahead of time, the pub gathering will be open to anyone who would like to join in. We’re not going to have any formal topics scheduled for the gathering — just a friendly gathering of like minded souls and of course, beer!

I hope to see you on Monday evening!

Mini-summit and pub evening in London on January 30

The BBC requested that we convene a meeting with MusicBrainz community members and MusicBrainz developers in London. The goal of this meeting is to open lines of communication between MusicBrainz community members and developers and the BBC. Now that editors from the BBC and its affiliates are using MusicBrainz more, we should aim to properly indoctrinate these editors into MusicBrainz’ community.

I’ve decided to take this opportunity and invite other companies who are using MusicBrainz or are interested in using MusicBrainz to join this meeting. If you are interested in working with MusicBrainz commercially and would like to find out more about MusicBrainz, please feel free to attend this meeting. This all-day mini-summit will focus on the people who attend the summit — the attendees will largely set the agenda for the day. We will have technical, community and business focused representatives present who can talk about nearly all aspects of MusicBrainz.

The meeting will be held on January 30 in central London — the exact venue will be determined shortly. If you are interested in attending our mini-summit, please send me email at rob at musicbrainz dot org. Please tell me who you are, which company you represent and what sorts of topics you would like to see discussed. I’ll start building a rough agenda based on this feedback.

After the meeting we’re going to adjourn to a pub and enjoy a pint of beer. If you’re interested in MusicBrainz more casually or would like to meet some of the people behind MusicBrainz, feel free to pop in. As with the main portion of the meeting, we’ll pick a central London venue closer to the date.

I will mail out information about the mini-summit directly to the attendees, but I will post more information about the pub evening here on this blog.

I hope to see you in London at the end of the month!