All Our Git Repositories Are Moving To GitHub

On February 11th 2013, we will be shutting down the MusicBrainz hosted Git repository, in favour of using GitHub for hosting. While we will continue to take backups, these will be internal and thus git.musicbrainz.org will cease to operate as it currently does.

There are a few reasons for this move, but the predominent reason is so MusicBrainz can host less. We currently host a lot of our own software and this is straining the already-limited resources we have. If someone else can do something just as well or better than we can – then let them! Using GitHub also means we get a slightly better repository browser, which can make communicating and discussing code easier. However, we are not moving to pull requests, though we may in the future.

We already mirror git.musicbrainz.org onto GitHub, so if you are only interested in read access, we recommend changing your local clone now, to save confusion in the future. To do this:

  1. cd to your musicbrainz-server clone.
  2. Run git remote set-url origin git://github.com/metabrainz/musicbrainz-server.git

That’s it! You should now be able to git pull just as you did before.

GitHub has a few other possible protocols for cloning, so if HTTP or HTTPS is better for you, then check out the GitHub repository for all the possible links.

If you’re a developer currently developing against our repositories, then you should either fork the repository on GitHub, or contact us to talk about getting your keys added.

Sorry for the disruption!

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.

A sad day for the Internet: RIP Aaron Swartz

As you’ve probably seen around the net today, Aaron Swartz, Internet Hero has committed suicide.

Aaron Swartz has spent most of life working to improve the Internet and to preserve freedom on the net. Many people are speaking to his awesome accomplishments in the last 10 years of his life, but I’d like to take a minute and reflect on his earlier years.

I was one of the fortunate people who met Aaron when he was still 15 — we first met up in Washington DC for O’Reilly’s P2P conference. Since he was a minor, his mom was accompanying him. Never mind that she had a broken leg at the time — she was so dedicated to her son that she traveled with him to allow him to participate in things that most minors couldn’t even imagine.

Before I met him in person, Aaron was an active contributor to MusicBrainz. When I started my first mis-guided attempts to create an RDF based web-service, he worked with me to improve the schema. He helped me understand RDF (damn that RDF spec!) and helped me fix the schema until it actually worked properly. Aaron was always looking for new and interesting things to do, so once his mission with MusicBrainz was done, he moved on to bigger and better things. And the things he did — simply amazing that one person can accomplish so much in so little time.

Aaron and I shared one passion — making data open and accessible. His means were always more aggressive than mine; he often chose the faster, more risky approach. I usually favor the slow-and-steady-will-win approach. Regardless, the events that led up to his suicide leave me deeply unsettled about the current state of affairs.

Aaron, thank you for being the instigator, shit-stirrer, advocate and dissident you were. I appreciate everything you’ve done during your short stay here in this troubled planet. May your next journey be more peaceful!

Thank you to Cory, Larry and Brewster for your kind words.

UPDATE: Here is a link to the paper Aaron wrote about MusicBrainz.

Replication issues, and packet 64833 is large

  1. We’ve ushered in the new year by discovering, then solving some issues with replication; packet number 64831 (from yesterday, 1AM UTC) didn’t build correctly and needed a bit of manual prodding. However, it’s now been pushed out and replication should be back to normal.
  2. As part of our fix process, we turned off production of replication packets for the bulk of today. As a result, packet number 64833 covers what would otherwise have been about 20 packets, and thus is somewhat large. The import process for this packet will accordingly take somewhat longer than usual.

Sorry for any inconvenience, and happy new year!

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.