Category: Development

Summer of Code: Acceptance and projected milestones

I’m pleased to announce that Google’s Summer of Code has announced which projects have been accepted. I’m pleased to let you know that our own Oliver Chalres and Lukáš Lalinský have been accepted to both work on our Next Generation Schema. Congratulations to both of you — this should be an exciting summer!

As the first act of getting ourselves organized for Summer of Code, the three of us have agreed to the following milestone schedule over the summer:

May 25: Object model and read-only user interface in place. This is essentially equivalent to Lukáš’ NGS-p implemented in Catalyst/Template Toolkit based on Oliver’s work from the last year. With this milestone users will be able to convert an existing database to the NGS schema and be able to browse the data in the new schema via the read-only user interface. No editing will be possible at this point in time.

June 29: The basic types are in place for editing artists, labels, and release-groups. Release and track level edits will not be complete.

July 27: Release and release related edit-types will be in place, but without a complete UI. The release edits will take a lot of work to get right so, we’ll have these edits in place, but may not be able to finish a working UI for them.

Aug 31: All remaining edit types are in place and the NGS enabled server enters a final beta phase.

Note that SoC doesn’t officially start until May 23 — we’re not wasting any time — in face our first milestone is due 2 days after SoC starts. Can you tell we’re serious this year?

Wiki Migration

Today’s the day – our wiki is being migrated to MediaWiki.  The old “moin” wiki is now read-only (and will remain so, at least for a few months), and is available on oldwiki.musicbrainz.org.  The new wiki, once all the data has been migrated across, will be at the usual address.

As soon as the migration is complete, I’ll switch wiki.musicbrainz.org over to point to MediaWiki.

Unfortunately it won’t be possible to also migrate the user accounts from moin to mediawiki, so regrettably this means that once mediawiki us up, you’ll have to re-create your accounts.  Sorry about that.

Update: the switch has been made – if you have any questions to ask or problems to report about this, please see the WikiMigration page.  Thanks!

Problem delivering mail to gmail / googlemail

This week MusicBrainz experienced problems while trying to deliver mail to gmail.com / googlemail.com. The problem is now fixed, but regrettably this means that some messages that MusicBrainz should have sent are now lost.

This week MusicBrainz experienced problems while trying to deliver mail to gmail.com / googlemail.com. The problems started on Tuesday morning (UK time).  On Friday morning the problem was identified as a broken DNS server, which was then fixed, thus resolving the problem.

Regrettably this means that some messages that MusicBrainz should have sent are now lost.  The number of lost messages is approximately:

  • 103 ‘subscriptions’ messages from Tuesday
  • 61 ‘subscriptions’ messages from Friday
  • 297 other messages (new user signup, edit notes, etc)

Please accept our apologies for this error.

Calling all guinea pigs!

I come bringing good news! With the latest version of the server now out in the wild, we’re ready to move on to the next stage of MusicBrainz development. But first a quick refresher…

You may recall, many moons ago I (Oliver Charles aka aCiD2) began work on moving the mb_server codebase from our own in-house framework, to the tried and tested Catalyst framework – along with separating out the HTML into separate Template Toolkit templates. Well, after what seems like an age, it’s finally got to the time where I can start getting some critical feedback from the most important people – you!

As from now, test.musicbrainz.org is now running the development branch of this work. It’s important to realise that this new codebase currently has no javascript support. This decision was made because it’s very important we get the website fully functional, and then add bells and whistles on later. We’re starting from a mostly clean slate, so there’s a lot of chance of things breaking, and JavaScript was likely to be just one more headache.

Oh, and I’ve never deployed a server like this before, so please bare with me while I work out any problems running the server. I’m going to London tomorrow and coming back Saturday evening (slightly bad timing, I’m aware) – but I’ll do my best to check any messages that come my way!

However, before you jump straight in and overload us with work – I’d like to lay down some guidelines for providing us with feedback. This will (hopefully) ensure that we can see to these bugs as fast as possible.

Where to report:

Standard practice- report at our bugtracker – bugs.musicbrainz.org

What should you report?

The most important things to report are actions that cause errors to occur, invalid behaviour or features that are simply not available, but are from the main server. You should also report typos and other visual problems – but I will be encouraging people to help fix these themselves (more on this later!).

What information should you provide?

The most critical information is that you can provide us with as much context as possible. Please let us know:

  • Any steps to reproduce the problem
  • Whether you are logged in or not
  • The address of the page that caused the problem
  • As much information as possible from the top of the error page

The last point relates somewhat to Catalyst. Catalyst features improved error handling and can provide us with a stack trace. You should try and include this stack trace, and the errors at the top. Chances are, we’ll be able to reproduce this from the information you provide – but if not, the stack trace gives us one more pointer to where the problem is 🙂

How should you organise the report?

Generally speaking, just try to fill in as many of the fields as possible. I’ll be reading every single report that comes in, and re-filing it myself where necessary. Ideally, set the component to ‘MusicBrainz’, the milestone to ‘Server: TemplateToolkit’ and assign the bug to me 🙂

So…

Let the bug crunching begin!

Main server updated

We just completed pushing the latest changes out to the main servers! We had a bit of a bumpy ride to roll out the upgrade — we’re noticing quite a few problems with collections right now and the Last Update feature brought our database server to its knees. As a result, we’ve disabled the Dashboard — we’ll re-enable it once we figure out what the problem is.

If you encounter a problem with the server, please file a bug report and select the 2008-11-23 version. Also, please check the open bug list to see if your problem has been reported before.

For a complete list of things that changed for this release, please see the release page on the wiki.

This massive release was brought to you by the tireless efforts of: Luks, Murdos, Djce, Jugdish, Acid2, Niklas and myself. Loads and loads of good testing came from Voiceinsideyou and Nikki. Thanks to everyone who helped with this release!

Also, if you’ve used Jugdish’s enhanced voting GreaseMonkey script, please disable it as it may cause problems since that functionality was included in this server release.

Call for testing: November 23 server release

Murdos, Niklas, Luks, Dave Evans and I have all been working on the upcoming server release and we would like to invite you to help us test this massive release. Most of the features for this release have been debugged, but a few bugs are still outstanding.

The test server has been updated with all of the latest features and is ready for you to log in with your normal user account with the password ‘mb’. The list of features in this release is described in this blog post and this post.

Submit new bug reports to our bug tracker. Also see, the milestone for this release to see which bugs have been fixed and which bugs are still open. Please check the open bug list before reporting a new bug.

Thanks to everyone who helped take part in the development for this release!

One more feature from good measure: CD Stubs

The final feature to be included in the upcoming release are CD Stubs. From the documentation page:

Many times people would like to contribute CD data to MusicBrainz, but would prefer to not learn to be part of MusicBrainz. These people would rather just toss some data into a pile and go on with their lives to listen to their music or rip their CDs. CD Stubs enable users to do just that.

With this release people who come to look up a CD, but MusicBrainz does not know about that CD, will be given a choice to either enter the CD as a CD Stub or to join MusicBrainz and to enter the CD into MusicBrainz proper. (This is the red pill/blue pill decision point). Note that users who are logged in to MusicBrainz when looking up a CD will not be given the option to enter a CD Stub.

To submit a CD Stub to the test server, use any MusicBrainz enabled CD lookup application to submit a CD to MusicBrainz. You must not be logged into the test server, otherwise you will never be given the option to submit a CD Stub. Then follow the instructions for how to submit a CD Stub.

To retrieve the CD Stub you must use the XML Webservice. CD Stubs are not available via the old RDF web service. Use this URL to fetch data for CDs that will also return CD Stubs if no CDs are available in the main DB:

http://[test.]musicbrainz.org/ws/1/release?type=xml&discid=[discid]&toc=[toc]

This URL is also available via libdiscid and its example program discid.

Discography, ratings, enhanced voting, dashboard, timeline and related tags now on test server

Murdos has been busy merging the various development branches into trunk — thanks for your work. I’ve updated the test server with the latest codebase. Come check out the latest new features:

(to log in use your normal log in name and password ‘mb‘)

We’ve got more bug fixes coming in the next couple of weeks. Also, the next server release has been scheduled for 2008-11-23. As usual, please report bugs to our bug tracker.

UPDATE: I had to clear everyone’s collections because of a bug. That’s fixed now — please start over again.
UPDATE2: Due to complaints by stodgy brits, Music Newz is now called Music News. 🙂