Category: Updates

Server update, 2013-02-11 and an important notice regarding edits

We’ve just finished pushing out another two weeks changes to the MusicBrainz web site. While this release is predominantly a bug fix release with a few small improvements, we’ve made a fairly substantial change to the way edits are applied.

As of this release, all subsequent edits entered will have an expiration period of 7 days – a reduction from the previous 14 days. We’ve made this change in order to reduce the time that editors have to wait for changes to be applied, which should lead to an improved user experience; and we’ve also made the change to hopefully try and make the edit queue a little bit more managable. This change is exploratory, so if you find it counterproductive, we’d love to hear your thoughts. IRC, the forums and the mailing lists are all good channels to voice your feedback.

Also, we have finally made the switch to GitHub. While the existing repository URLs will continue to work, they will no longer be updated. If you want to stay up to date with the latest code, make sure to update your checkout information.

Many thanks to Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Michael Wiencek, Nicolás Tamargo and the rest of the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release. Here’s what’s new:

Bug

  • [MBS-3457] – Direct search results incorrectly reports a recording as "standalone"
  • [MBS-3962] – Edit search doesn’t really exclude artists with "is not"
  • [MBS-4522] – Empty annotations are not merged correctly
  • [MBS-5144] – The MusicBrainz logo in the top-left corner has a different background color than the rest of the header
  • [MBS-5395] – "Actions" column on alias page is too narrow for translations
  • [MBS-5432] – Internal server error when editing cover art
  • [MBS-5434] – Inconsistent terminology: primary/secondary types and type/extra types
  • [MBS-5506] – Edit search for "My vote is not" does not work as expected
  • [MBS-5525] – Blank edit relationship type edits
  • [MBS-5566] – No more autoedit mark ?
  • [MBS-5567] – Internal server error entering remove cover art edit
  • [MBS-5617] – "new image goes here" is not translatable
  • [MBS-5650] – ISE when attempting to approve already-closed release group edit
  • [MBS-5655] – It’s possible to "Remove [a] release label" although there’s none
  • [MBS-5696] – ModBot can fail to close ‘edit artist’ edits that violate uniqueness on (name, comment).
  • [MBS-5698] – Some move disc ID edits display nothing for the old release
  • [MBS-5700] – Subscribers aren’t removed when a user deletes their account
  • [MBS-5705] – Rows in the appearances section of the artist relationships tab are sometimes one column too short
  • [MBS-5719] – The track number of the last track on some 2-disc releases is missing
  • [MBS-5724] – Sort/copy name missing for work aliases
  • [MBS-5728] – Possible to enter ‘edit release group’ edits that fail to apply due to spaces in artist credits
  • [MBS-5732] – Empty labels don’t warn for deletion pending
  • [MBS-5740] – Useless "select all" checkbox on Release Duplicates tab
  • [MBS-5742] – Editing a work without JS on will enter a silent remove ISWC edit
  • [MBS-5748] – Not possible to "Approve" an edit where yours is the only "No" vote
  • [MBS-5750] – Subscriptions report filtering ignores labels
  • [MBS-5754] – Editing recordings from tracklist does not work if "Release Duplicate" is chosen
  • [MBS-5762] – "Work Type" and "Work Language" incorrectly left blank for "Merge Works" edits when viewing predefined edit searches
  • [MBS-5763] – Edit release edits not properly translated
  • [MBS-5764] – Work language column in the stats links to releases
  • [MBS-5770] – There is no constraint on release_label that either (or both) the label or catalog number are not null.
  • [MBS-5771] – Add utamap.com （うたまっぷ） in the lyrics URL white list
  • [MBS-5774] – "Vote on all edits" is not translatable
  • [MBS-5776] – Cover art types are not being translated on the cover art tab
  • [MBS-5777] – Users’ work ratings page has no title
  • [MBS-5786] – i18n: secondary RG type labels on overview are untranslatable
  • [MBS-5788] – No edit is created when trying to submit/attach a DiscID
  • [MBS-5791] – ISRCs can’t be removed
  • [MBS-5797] – Internal server error if the Wikipedia link is not really a Wikipedia link

Improvement

  • [MBS-1413] – Make profile bios support WikiFormat
  • [MBS-1774] – Webservice: expose UUID for AR type
  • [MBS-3535] – Stack traces should mention which server was handling the request
  • [MBS-4880] – Add Help/Info about How "Merge mediums and recordings" works
  • [MBS-4902] – Add Google+ links to the sidebar
  • [MBS-5505] – Add j-lyric.net to the lyrics whitelist
  • [MBS-5605] – Ratings on collection pages
  • [MBS-5707] – Add autoselect for IMDb URL relationships for labels
  • [MBS-5727] – Disc [medium] title missing from edit relationships page
  • [MBS-5767] – Add an index on (editor, id DESC)
  • [MBS-5775] – Update Facebook URL cleanup to use https
  • [MBS-5779] – Remove useless nbsp on common-macros.tt
  • [MBS-5798] – Normalise wikisource URLs to http
  • [MBS-5803] – Add autoselect for SecondHandSongs artist URL

Task

  • [MBS-5757] – Consider diminishing time edits stay open
  • [MBS-5766] – Open up /release/ and /work/ in robots.txt
  • [MBS-5810] – Add Open Library to the other databases whitelist

The Git tag for this release is v-2013-02-11.

Preparing for the May 15th schema change release

It it time for us to start the process towards the next schema change release. 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. Drive 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. Each schema change feature requires two tickets: 1) An SQL ticket that implements the actual changes to the database and defines the queries used to fetch the data. 2) A UI change ticket that implements the UI portions of the schema change ticket.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Have the ticket reviewed by a developer for clarity and completeness, then address any issues said developer may raise.

On 15 February, 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.

We’re going to follow the this schedule:

  • 1 Feb: Schema change ticket selection starts
  • 15 Feb: Select schema change tickets for implementation, start making tickets fully actionable
  • 1 March: Tickets must be fully actionable. Tickets that are not actionable will be dropped from the 15 May release.
  • 15 March: SQL tickets must be fully implemented.
  • 1 May: UI tickets must be fully implemented, start final ticket testing phase
  • 15 May: Release day

All of these dates have been added to our new community calendar.

Server Update, 2012-01-28

We’ve just finished releasing the last release for January, 2013. This release is a combination of bug fixes and improvements to existing features, and was worked on by Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Michael Wiencek, Nicolás Tamargo, Pavan Chander and the rest of the MusicBrainz team. Thanks for your hard work, everyone! Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-5022] – Release Editor: Missing entities page doesn’t handle 0 or only 1 result
  • [MBS-5453] – Bad redirect(s) https→http
  • [MBS-5540] – Release editor eats tracklists
  • [MBS-5586] – ISE when trying to submit an “Edit artist” edit with no changes
  • [MBS-5609] – JSON webservice doesn’t send relationship attributes
  • [MBS-5614] – Links to edit notes to other edit notes always use http
  • [MBS-5691] – Artists’ recording lists show ISRCs but don’t link to them
  • [MBS-5699] – CD stubs use “disambiguation” instead of “comment”
  • [MBS-5711] – IPIs missing from IPI element in JSON webservice
  • [MBS-5712] – JSON webservice handles missing values inconsistently
  • [MBS-5713] – Alias types missing from the JSON webservice

Improvement

  • [MBS-4536] – Include the presence of cover art in the webservice
  • [MBS-5304] – “Other Databases” whitelist: “Trove” ammendment
  • [MBS-5447] – Bandwidth performance: revert MBS-4764 now that thumbnail quality has improved
  • [MBS-5606] – Implement STYLE-160 (The Session) in code
  • [MBS-5651] – Clicking link for packaging types loses all entered information
  • [MBS-5652] – Release Label sorting makes no sense on Release Group page
  • [MBS-5702] – Change the text on the “Read more…” link under wikipedia extracts
  • [MBS-5739] – Disconnect database handle on page timeout
  • [MBS-5741] – Time out edit searches in 45 seconds, rather than 30.
  • [MBS-5749] – 401 error: Add link to profile edit page

Task

  • [MBS-5758] – Remove schwag/store links from musicbrainz.org pages

The Git tag for this release is v-2013-01-28.

Server update, 2013-01-14

After delaying this release by a week due to Christmas/New Year getting in the way, we have pushed out a new update of the MusicBrainz web site. This release consists mostly of bug fixes and a few outstanding tasks that we still needed to complete. Thanks to Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Michael Wiencek, Johannes Weißl and the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release! Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-5288] – Use API when checking for WikiDoc changes
  • [MBS-5577] – Relationship Editor displays "vocal vocals"
  • [MBS-5663] – Leap year in "Edit Relationships"
  • [MBS-5716] – Reorder mediums edit is missing a space between medium title and old position
  • [MBS-5717] – Reorder mediums edit for mediums without titles shouldn’t include colons

Improvement

  • [MBS-5723] – Allow sorting collections by all columns, not just a select few.

Task

  • [MBS-3856] – Revert MBS-1052 "Amazon should lookup cover art by barcode too"
  • [MBS-5729] – Consolidate Metabrainz:Sponsors and About/Sponsors

Sub-task

  • [MBS-3974] – Filter by release country

The Git tag for this release is v-2013-01-14.

Server update, 2012-12-24

We don’t rest for seasonal holidays at MusicBrainz, and we’ve just finished pushing out another release! This one is quite a small one release – thanks to Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Nicolás Tamargo, Pavan Chander and the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release. Here’s what’s changed:

Bug

  • [MBS-5288] – Use API when checking for WikiDoc changes
  • [MBS-5497] – CAA uploads are setting x-archive-meta-mediatype to ‘images’, but it should be ‘image’
  • [MBS-5664] – musicbrainz_unaccent serverlog error message

Improvement

  • [MBS-2966] – Give artist credits a special mark
  • [MBS-3412] – Recording name in tooltip when hovering cursor over track title
  • [MBS-4605] – S3 settings in DBDefs.pm are badly named

Task

  • [MBS-5440] – Add lieder.net to the lyrics whitelist
  • [MBS-5684] – Add Yate Tagger to Products menu and home page
  • [MBS-5685] – Add SongKong to Products menu and home page
  • [MBS-5686] – Update to new Amazon Affiliate Tags

Server update, 2012-12-10

We’ve just finished pushing out an update to the musicbrainz.org servers. While work continues on the new edit system and an ingestion solution, this is a fairly small release of mostly bug fixes. Thanks to Pavan Chander and the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release!

Bug

  • [MBS-5035] – Removing release leaves orphaned recordings
  • [MBS-5126] – Orphaned recordings do not get removed (regression)
  • [MBS-5548] – Git commit data output isn’t HTML escaped
  • [MBS-5576] – Release group bar when adding disc IDs is one column too short
  • [MBS-5581] – Some stuff untranslated that wasn’t before
  • [MBS-5618] – Wikipedia abstract logic doesn’t properly encode certain characters
  • [MBS-5622] – MB registration captcha does not work over SSL

Improvement

  • [MBS-4228] – Improve artist alias description
  • [MBS-4568] – Add <bdi> tags to help with rendering of RTL text
  • [MBS-5260] – Cache /text.js somehow
  • [MBS-5317] – Webservice needs to support fmt=json switch to fmt=jsonnew for search queries
  • [MBS-5477] – Show country and gender in artist search results

New Feature

  • [MBS-4108] – Display Wikipedia abstract inline

The Git tag for this release is v-2012-12-10.

Yet another fixed VM uploaded

Though the last version of the 2012-10-15 VM fixed the .ovf to remove an accidentally-included extra disk, this time an incorrect version of a different disk was added. This has been corrected and the finished product tested a bit, so hopefully this time we won’t need another followup blog post!

This time it’s MusicBrainz 2012-10-15.ova, in the usual places.

Server update, 2012-11-27

We’ve just finished pushing out a tiny little update to the MusicBrainz servers. This one improves on the ‘set release group cover art’ feature, but exposing an interface to make these changes. Later work will expose this cover art in more places. So, here’s the grand list of what has changed! Thanks to the MusicBrainz developers for their work on this release.

Bug

  • [MBS-4627] – Highlight all images with pending edits

Improvement

  • [MBS-5265] – Add release-group front cover art support

The Git tag for this release is v-2012-11-27.

Server update, 2012-11-14

We’ve just finishing pushing out another update to the MusicBrainz web servers. Sadly, this one is both a little bit later and quite a bit smaller than our normal releases – blame the summit for that! Many thanks to Frederik “Freso” S. Olesen, Michael Wiencek, Wieland Hoffmann and the MusicBrainz team for their work in this release. Before we get to the release notes, a quick announcement regarding DBDefs:

DBDefs.pm

This release features a new way of working with DBDefs, and we recommend everyone who runs a MusicBrainz server to reset their DBDefs to the new system. However, this should only be necessary if you run a web server – if you only use replication it should be possible to continue with the old DBDefs. To use the new DBDefs:

  1. Copy lib/DBDefs.pm.sample to lib/DBDefs.pm.
  2. Edit lib/DBDefs.pm to match your configuration.

This will give you a DBDefs.pm configuration that will continue to work with future changes to DBDefs, rather than causing exceptions as it previously did.

Release notes

Here’s what we got fixed:

Bug

  • [MBS-4180] – Strange behaviour for artist credits when renaming artist
  • [MBS-5200] – Errors are not translatable
  • [MBS-5247] – Fix all the invalid HTML reported by MBS-5246
  • [MBS-5292] – /release/MBID/cover-art doesn’t list cover art if you have not loaded the edits dumps on your slave server
  • [MBS-5389] – Relationship editor doesn’t correctly handle relating a recording on the release to another recording on the release
  • [MBS-5431] – Moving entities to or merging them artists into Deleted Artist should not be allowed
  • [MBS-5438] – Text overlaps help bubble in relationship editor
  • [MBS-5454] – Broken link to `remove recording edit-type’ documentation on remove recording page
  • [MBS-5456] – Middle click paste does not trigger URL match/cleanup
  • [MBS-5464] – Blog posts on the front page are cached for too long
  • [MBS-5471] – No correct search results even with a recording ID (during Add Release)
  • [MBS-5476] – Pressing enter in empty fields selects instruments / vocals
  • [MBS-5480] – screen space with many artists in the add relationship widget
  • [MBS-5485] – Artist comments not always converted to use XML character references
  • [MBS-5509] – Interface language isn’t persistent enough
  • [MBS-5521] – Date placeholders in the relationship editor are not translated
  • [MBS-5529] – New relationship editor overheats
  • [MBS-5538] – Pressing enter in work add adds/removes ISWC instead of submitting

Improvement

  • [MBS-3353] – Accept XX:XX:XX track times
  • [MBS-4578] – Improve configuration of server
  • [MBS-5206] – Guess Case: Remove the Classical mode
  • [MBS-5246] – Implement html5 validation using validator.nu.
  • [MBS-5433] – Include interface language in stack traces
  • [MBS-5445] – All the widgets forms should submit when hitting <Enter> in a field
  • [MBS-5477] – Show country and gender in artist search results
  • [MBS-5537] – Display only ‘Add note’ on the note & vote submit button when the edit is already closed

Task

  • [MBS-5504] – Add "DHHU" to the "Other Databases" whitelist

Sub-task

  • [MBS-5488] – Amazon coverart over SSL
  • [MBS-5489] – Basic switch-scheme-only coverart over SSL

The Git tag for this release is v-2012-11-14.