Category: Development

Where is NGS Beta 2?

I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news? NGS Beta 2 will be delayed by 4 weeks until June 21st. The good news? Read on!

The main reason why we’re having to slip the release is that we’ve finally found a UX design volunteer (Alisa Lemberg aka Aleeeza) who has been working with us to design a release editor that works well for the broad range of users we have. We had to go back quite a few steps in our previous work to come up with a sane release editor. Having a good user experience for one of the most critical pieces of MusicBrainz was more important to us than keeping our beta 2 schedule. In the nick of time for our deadline the new release editor will be available for public input as soon as Ollie (slacker!) is done updating the test server. Expect another post tomorrow.

The second reason that we’re behind is that we decided to make some really important fixes to the new Web Service. We’re going to ensure that the vast number of releases credited to Johann Sebastian Bach do not execute a denial of service attack on our servers (this is part the dreaded JSB problem). Warp has written a new specification for the new Web Service that illustrates our new approach. Unfortunately Beta 2 will not include the new browsing features discussed, but the other aspects will be adapted as per spec for beta 2.

Third, Ollie will shoot to finish all NGS edits (including migrating old edits) for the beta 2 release. This will make beta 2 complete with all of the most important features!

We’ve also agreed to add one more beta release (called Release Candidate 1) before we release NGS in order to give more exposure to NGS as we get closer to finishing.

Finally, we’re considering delaying a number of non-critical features to the releases beyond NGS. The dashboard, timeline, statistics and auto-editor elections are not critical for us delivering NGS. But, the development of NGS has dragged on long enough that we really ought to finish as soon as possible and that may mean delaying these features for a little while. (we can do auto editor elections by hand on a mailing list if need be). We’re not dropping these features — we’re simply delaying them for a few weeks past the NGS release (and perhaps a hot bug fix release immediately post NGS).

What do you think about us dropping non-critical features in exchange for delivering NGS sooner? Tell us about it in the comments!

Summer of Code: Accepted projects

Congratulations to the following students for being accepted to Summer of Code for MusicBrainz:

  1. Jamie McDonald (jdamcd): MusicBrainz Android Mobile Application
  2. Sean Burke (leftmost): Improve collections feature
  3. Jens Lukas (jensl): Development of an iPhone application for MusicBrainz

We’re currently in the community bonding period and work on these projects will start soon. Currently Jens and Jamie are reconciling their respective applications into one coherent application specification so that the application we deliver for Android and iPhone behave in similar manners.

Congratulations Jamie, Jens and Sean!

NGS Beta 2: May 24th 2010

After much scheduling and getting our ducks in a row, we’re pleased to announce the final beta release of NGS on May 24th! This is one year after our last release, so this date is a little bitter/sweet for us. I had hoped to get this release out before then, but the team is making sure we’re getting this release right, and there are a ton of difficult things to get right.

And the tentative release date for NGS is going to be in July. No promises on a firm date yet.

mb_server is now hosted on Git

Today we are officially marking the transition of mb_server (that’s the code name for the MusicBrainz Server – the website) from Subversion to Git. This is now hosted at git.musicbrainz.org, and the “musicbrainz-server/core.git” repository contains the stable and unstable development branches (named master and next, respectively).

If you are just interested in setting up MusicBrainz locally, and not interested in development, the same instructions apply as before – use the latest RELEASE branch from Subversion. The git changes should only be of interest to those who were running the “trunk” branch from Subversion, and wish to test or contribute to the upcoming NGS server.

For more information about Git & MusicBrainz, see the Git wiki page

Testing the NGS live data feed

If anyone would like to test out the NGS replication, which I’ve setup from the test server, follow these instructions:

  • Download and install the mb_server source code from SVN trunk. Follow these instructions.
  • Set your server type in DBDefs.pm to RT_SLAVE
  • Download and import this dataset.
  • Insert this required row into the database, using our psql program: 
    cd /admin
./psql READWRITE
insert into replication_control values (1, 12, 36169, '2010-01-23 00:00:02.604674+00');
  • Now run admin/replication/LoadReplicationChanges a few minutes after the hour to keep up to date with the data on the test server. Please note that this system may not be stable yet and that we will occaisionally load new data on our test server, which will require you to reload the data on your server.

Good luck!

Database on test server updated

The database on the test server has been updated with the latest data and search indexes to match the latest work that ijabz’ has done. This update was in preparation for testing the replication system, which I’ll invite the general public to try in a few hours.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The passwords on the test server are now the same as the passwords from the main server as of January 23.

Announcing NGS Beta 1!

After many years of discussion, planning and hard work, we’ve finally reached the much anticipated Next Generation Schema Beta 1 release!

For all the information on this release, please take a look at our release notes. Then head over to the test server and play with it!

Most important of all, please note that we are using Jira to keep track of bug for the MusicBrainz server now. Please do not enter bugs for Beta 1 into the old (trac) bug tracker!

Many thanks to the countless people who have helped make NGS a reality!

NGS Beta 1 is coming: Monday January 18

I’m pleased to announce that we’re almost ready to release beta 1 of the much anticipated Next Generation Schema. All of the important core functions are complete and we’ve even done a first round of sanity checking to make sure what what we release will be useful. We won’t have all of the features for NGS done — there will be some things that we simply won’t have finished by then.

But, this release is important since we feel that we want the community to help us take a look at NGS and help us flush out problems before we polish NGS for release.

We’ll have loads of more details and even some documentation for you by next monday. Stay tuned!