On Wednesday we rolled out an upgrade of our indexed search servers. These search servers are used for search in both the web service and website. This release includes some fixes and improvements added to make it easier to handle some particular search cases, plus few other fixes. A fairly critical bug with respect to work searching was came up yesterday after this update, but we’ve released a hot-fix patch to solve that problem. Here are the release notes:
Bug
[SEARCH-82] – Relation Type in Work relation list is reported as {xxxx}{yyyy}zzz
[SEARCH-104] – Querying "code:XXXXX" in a label search returns no results.
[SEARCH-106] – target-type attribute missing in relation-list elements
[SEARCH-110] – Web service is returning ‘disambiguation’ element in release groups
Apologies for being a few days late here, but we’ve just finished updating the servers with the latest set of bug fixes and new features. This release brings a new feature that people have been asking for since NGS – the ability to “split” an artist into artist credits.
Split Artist
With NGS, we had the ability to link multiple artists to recordings/releases/etc. While our migration script handled most cases, there are some cases when it was unclear how to automatically split artists, and we opted to leave that artist unchanged. While it was possible to manually edit references to this artist, it was painful. We now have a convenient way to make this process easier. In the sidebar of artists there is now a “split into separate artists” link:
The new "split into separate artists" feature
Clicking this link will present you with a form where you can choose the new set of artists. For example, here’s me splitting the single “Alix Perez & SpetraSoul” artist into the correct separate artists:
The "split artists" form
As with the other types of editing in MusicBrainz, this edit has to be voted on by other editors before it is applied.
The split artists edit type can only be used on artists that have no relationships, other than “collaboration” relationships. If the artist does have collaboration relationships, edits to remove all collaboration relationships will be entered at the same time. Note also that this will not remove the now empty artist entirely – that will happen when ModBot does its daily cleanup.
Bugs
We’ve continued working through the bugs as well, and here are the tickets that have been closed in this release.
[MBS-1133] – Don’t try to delete relationship types that are still in use
[MBS-1343] – Add AR instrument search function has problems with accented letters
[MBS-1380] – An URL ending in closing parenthesis gets broken when listed in edit notes
[MBS-3453] – “Related works” on recordings page shows same work and AR set twice if there are two work<->recording ARs for the same work/recording pair
[MBS-3464] – Do not redirect www.musicbrainz.org to musicbrainz.org for /ws requests
Task
[MBS-1914] – Run script to remove “later/earlier release of” ARs
[MBS-3265] – Webservice not escaping "<<" properly
Improvement
[MBS-2232] – Auto-approve Add Medium and Add Release Label edits for new releases
[MBS-2839] – Artist work list > Better design: don’t split by "categories" (composer, lyricist, …) and indicates artist role for each artist related to work
Today we released our first schema change update since NGS. This change is quite a radical one, as it merges both of our databases (“READWRITE” and “RAWDATA”) into a single database. For most users of the database, this probably won’t affect you, but you’re encouraged to run the upgrade process anyway. Here’s what you need to do:
Take down the web server running MusicBrainz, if you’re running a web server.
Turn off cron jobs if you are automatically updating the database via cron jobs.
Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 13 in lib/DBDefs.pm
Make sure your REPLICATION_TYPE setting is RT_SLAVE
Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-20110711-schema-change
Run ./upgrade.sh from the top of the source directory.
Install the perl modules Algorithm::Merge and Algorithm::Diff
Turn cron jobs back on, if needed.
Restart the MusicBrainz web server, if needed.
This process may take a while, as it has to dump one database into another, and download a few extra changes to ensure slaves aren’t missing any data. The RAWDATA database should no longer be in use and you should be able to drop it, but waiting to see that everything is working well might be a good idea.
This schema change does not introduce any new data. For everyone else, here’s a list of what got fixed since the last release!
We’ve now slowed down a bit from the hot fixes and are starting to roll out weekly releases. To kick things off, here’s what we’ve just pushed out to the main servers:
Bug
[MBS-1071] – Relationships with pending edits should be highlighted
This is essentially a stripped down version of the old MusicBrainz timeline. Lots more interesting features to come with this project, and it’s showing great potential!
The Git tag for this release is v-2011-06-01-ngs-bugfixes.
A small set of fixes to finish the week. The next release after this is currently scheduled for Wednesday. Thanks for sticking with us through the NGS launch week! Please keep the bug reports coming in, no matter how insignificant you think the issue may be, your reporting has been tremendously helpful. The Git tag for this version is ocharles/v-2011-05-27-ngs-hotfixes – the official tag will be out late Monday (I don’t have a key to sign the tag with).
One note about the Sound Juicer/RhythmBox issues – this is actually a problem with programs being compiled against libmusicbrainz2, instead of libmusicbrainz3 and there’s nothing we can do about these problems. If you are experiencing problems we recommend you compile from source, or wait/pester your distribution to update their packages.
Bug
[MBS-2249] – Sound Juicer no longer works with NGS
[MBS-2274] – Sort names being returned incorrectly for multiple artist credits on /ws/1
[MBS-2295] – UX: Add Missing Entities loses your selections for artists if you forget to select (or add new artist sort-name for) one of them
[MBS-2328] – When seed release editor with recording ids for tracks the Release Editor associates them with the wrong tracks unless recording ids have been allocated for every track
[MBS-2332] – Error trying to edit tracklist of a release to remove excesive quoting
[MBS-2350] – Subscribe link doesn’t work (missing id)
Improvement
[MBS-2353] – Update javascript code for relationships so Wikipedia URL are recognized automatically for works
