Category: Development

Server update, 2015-10-19

Today’s release fixes some bugs causing certain open edits to get stuck, and improves on our URL auto-selection code. Notably, URL shorteners are now detected and blocked from being entered.

The git tag is v-2015-10-19.

Bug

  • [MBS-8571] – Stuck edit: medium_positions does not account for all mediums in all releases
  • [MBS-8572] – Stuck edit: update or delete on table “recording” violates foreign key constraint “recording_alias_fk_recording” on table “recording_alias”
  • [MBS-8573] – “Edit artist” edit can be entered with a disambiguation comment containing only whitespace

Improvement

  • [MBS-6534] – URL autoselect LinkedIn → has a social networking page at
  • [MBS-7904] – Block URL shorterners

Task

  • [MBS-8244] – Add “social network” autoselect for foursquare

Server update, 2015-10-05

Besides the changes listed below, this release should mark the completion of the incremental sitemaps work required by Google. Practically, this means I’ll have more time to work on user-facing features from now on.

Thanks to Gentlecat and Zas for their work on today’s release. The git tag is v-2015-10-05.

Bug

  • [MBS-7828] – Seeding secondary types doesn’t work
  • [MBS-8553] – Internal server error when an automatic series reordering involves multiple of the same entity
  • [MBS-8561] – The entity type should be preselected when following an “Add to a new collection” link on an entities page

Improvement

  • [MBS-8554] – Cache area containments
  • [MBS-8560] – Add Google Play to the sidebar

Updated libcoverart-1.0.0.tar.gz

It was brought to my attention that the tarball for the libcoverart 1.0.0 release wasn’t built correctly, and contained files within a confusingly named subdirectory.

I’ve rebuilt the tarball, and made it available via GitHub as usual. Please note that as a result of this, the MD5 checksum of the tarball has changed. The file content of the archive is, however, unchanged.

The new tarball is available here: libcoverart-1.0.0.tar.gz (MD5 checksum: 856d83a4e57a2325c168eb979b9c00d8)

The MusicBrainz documentation page for the library was also updated to reflect this.

Server update, 2015-09-21

We just have a small release today, so I’ll let the changelog speak for itself. I’m currently focused on finishing implementing the hourly sitemaps required by Google (to indicate when our embedded JSON-LD markup last changed), and Roman Tsukanov is continuing to familiarize himself with our huge codebase. So, development in other areas will pick up in time. 🙂

The git tag for today’s release is v-2015-09-21.

Bug

  • [MBS-8370] – « Format: Medium » is shown instead of, for instance, « Format: CD »
  • [MBS-8534] – Label-only release label edits no longer display the catalog number

Improvement

  • [MBS-8523] – For Places, rename “founded” and “defunct” to “opened” and “closed”

Server update, 2015-09-07

The 2015-09-07 server update is released today (a day late). Late because I wanted to investigate a fix for cover art uploading, which many people have reported issues with lately. Notwithstanding troubles at the Internet Archive, the server should hopefully give less errors now when uploading.

The other changes deal with edit-system bugs and URL cleanup enhancements.

Thanks to Gentlecat and reosarevok for their work on today’s release. The git tag is v-2015-09-07 and the changelog is below.

Bug

  • [MBS-8531] – Delete release label edits with no label fail to display
  • [MBS-8532] – Can’t edit a release label to add a label
  • [MBS-8533] – Catalog number-only release label edits no longer show in a MB Label’s edits
  • [MBS-8543] – Error uploading image: MalformedPOSTRequest

Improvement

  • [MBS-8124] – Recognise and clean up Loudr.fm URLs
  • [MBS-8182] – Improve Deezer URL cleanup

Roman Tsukanov joins the MetaBrainz team

I’m pleased to announce that last week we officially hired Roman Tsukanov, AKA Gentlecat to be a part time developer for MusicBrainz!

Gentlecat has already established himself firmly in our community: Last year he rocked the CritiqueBrainz project for Summer of Code and this summer he rocked AcousticBrainz. And he’s written our shiny new MetaBrainz web site! He is now in the process of learning perl and has started to help Bitmap review existing code reviews. And he has even fixed a couple of issues already. In other words he lives up to his name: To Gentlecat something means to rock it!

I’m quite happy to have such a capable developer participating in MusicBrainz. Welcome to the team Gentlecat!

August Community Revisit

Ohoi m’hearties, it’s time for the first monthly Community Revisit, where we’ll revisit what happened in MetaBrainzLand during the last month. Ready for the ride? Leggo!

The primary thing happening this month has likely been the changes in the MetaBrainz employee line-up following Ian’s departure in July. In the beginning of the month, Freso (wait, hey, that’s me!) was pulled on board as Community Manager (a brand new position for MetaBrainz too!), and just at the end of the month, GSoC wonder child Roman “Gentlecat” Tsukanov was hired as the new software engineer. So hi to us two! 🙂

Speaking of GSoC, the Google Summer of Code, this year’s edition is also fast coming to an end, and our four students and their projects are closing up and giving their work the final touches to have them ready to go live. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about these projects soon.

One thing that did go live during August, in no small part thanks to Ben “LordSputnik” Ockmore and Leo_Verto: the new IRC chat logger! Chat logs from IRC are now available at http://chatlogs.metabrainz.org/ – the site still needs some MetaBrainzifying, but Ben has done a great job of importing (pretty much) all the old chat logs to the new system and the bot is running in all the official MetaBrainz channels. If you’re on IRC (or you just like poking at the IRC logs), be sure to say “Thank you!! <3” to LordSputnik and Leo_Verto next time you see them around!

Another person who has made a mark in the last month was Alex a.k.a. caller#6, starting up the discussion about the current situation of MusicBrainz’ Area entities. Be sure to check out that blog post and let your voice be heard, if you don’t feel like it’s being represented already. The next instalment should be out before long.

We also had two server updates (pretty much all bug fixes) and an updated Virtual Machine image was finally released for the more tech oriented people.

This about rounds off the August Community Revisit. What do you think about the format? Did I miss any important community happenings? Any other comments? This is a brand new venture, so nothing’s set in stone yet!

From Denmark with love,
Freso

There will be no autumn 2015 schema change

Schema changes are always a lot of work for us and we end up spending much time preparing for it and then even more time cleaning up/catching up after it. As a result, some critical non-schema change features keep getting pushed back… to the point that we never get to them.

To try and break this cycle, we’re going to skip the Autumn 2015 schema change. Instead we will focus on other tasks such as hosting and community features.

We will resume our schedule with the next planned schema change around 15 May, 2016. After that release we will determine if we want to go ahead with 1 or 2 schema change releases a year.

Server update, 2015-08-24

Today’s release contains only bug-fixes. We’ve fixed an issues with “downvoted” tags being lost after a merge, and made release label edits more robust when the related releases or labels are merged. The git tag is v-2015-08-24 and the changelog is below.

Bug

  • [MBS-3867] – Edit release label fails prerequisite when labels are merged
  • [MBS-8462] – Webservice can create tags with upper-case letters
  • [MBS-8505] – Up/down vote for tags that contains uppercase letters updates a lowercase version of that tag
  • [MBS-8515] – Can’t edit or add entities related to an URL
  • [MBS-8516] – Relationships used as documentation examples can’t be merged
  • [MBS-8517] – Internal server error loading /ws/2/collection?fmt=json
  • [MBS-8518] – Edit release label edits get stuck after the release is merged
  • [MBS-8524] – Merging entities can corrupt tags up/down-votes
  • [MBS-8528] – Trying to search for an example to add to a relationship type gives “Lookup failed: Not Acceptable”
  • [MBS-8529] – compile_resources.sh: Error: ENOENT, no such file or directory ‘/home/i18n/musicbrainz-server/po/javascript.<lang>.po’

Server update, 2015-08-10

This is mostly a bug-fix release, with one important note for people running their own server:

A longstanding issue with versions of MooseX::Role::Parameterized greater than 1.02 has been fixed, and now version 1.03 or greater is required. If you’re using cpanm as INSTALL.md suggests, running cpanm MooseX::Role::Parameterized will get the latest version. If you’re using the new VM, sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade will install the latest packaged dependencies from our PPA repository.

Thanks to all who contributed to today’s release. The git tag is v-2015-08-10 and the changelog is below.

Bug

  • [MBS-8495] – Lieder archive has moved to lieder.net
  • [MBS-8498] – Entities in a collection not mergeable
  • [MBS-8499] – Entities in a collection not removed when empty
  • [MBS-8501] – Work edit form is broken because document.currentScript is not available in all supported browsers
  • [MBS-8502] – Cookies are no longer persistent
  • [MBS-8507] – Duplicate checking code can prevent editing existing entity
  • [MBS-8514] – Work credits’ AC cannot be removed nor edited

Improvement

  • [MBS-2477] – Relationship edits should track merges