Server update 2012-03-19

We’ve just finished pushing out a new server update, that addresses a few minor bugs. We initially planned to roll these changes in with the release of our Cover Art Archive, but sadly this project needs a bit longer. Many thanks to Johannes Weißl, Wieland Hoffman, Ian McEwan and the MusicBrainz team for their work on this release.

Bug

  • [MBS-3897] – Missing space in template for ARs w/disambig
  • [MBS-4291] – Default install looks for compiled js/css.
  • [MBS-4368] – Release editor: track parser is broken
  • [MBS-4383] – Statistics page is showing "Active Last Week" stats twice, leaving out "Edited Last Week"
  • [MBS-4391] – Track parser broken
  • [MBS-4399] – Medium titles not displayed when attaching a discid to a medium
  • [MBS-4403] – DBD::Pg::st execute failed: ERROR: new row for relation "recording" violates check constraint "recording_length_check" at lib/Sql.pm line 396
  • [MBS-4404] – /ws/1 uses the wrong language code
  • [MBS-4407] – Edit artist alias should fail if edited alias is deleted

Improvement

  • [MBS-1363] – Add threading headers to mod note emails
  • [MBS-1473] – Report: unlikely language-script combinations
  • [MBS-3313] – New/old edits wording in edit search is misleading
  • [MBS-4044] – Cleanup Discogs URLs
  • [MBS-4284] – Normalize URL encoding for specific sites

A Git tag will be pushed out later. The commit sha is 03343aa460d1.

Another anonymous donation: ~$7500

I’m very happy to announce that another organization has made a large donation to MusicBrainz. Like our other donation from 2012, this company would also like to remain anonymous for the time being.

There is one thing very different about this donation: Its from a record label!

Not too long ago we didn’t have any contacts with record labels and the record labels didn’t really want much to do with us, but that has changed. This signals a deeper adoption of MusicBrainz in the music industry, which I find quite interesting and exciting!

Thank you for your generosity, anonymous donor!

Preparing for the May 15th schema change release

For our last schema change release we had a ton of issues around which tickets we should address and which ones were properly defined for us to work on. I’d like to make this a lot more clear for the next go round; here is what we’re going to do:

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. Derive 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. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Have the ticket reviewed by a developer for clarity and completeness, then address any issues said developer may raise.

On 19 March, 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.

Open source projects: Do you have servers that need RAM?

As part of our recent server donation, we’ve got piles of 20 1GB ECC server modules kicking around that we won’t put to use. Rather than them go to waste, I would much rather send them to *your* open source project and have you use them. Before too long we will have some servers to donate as well. If you need ECC ram or a server for your open source project, please leave a comment with the following information:

  • The name and URL of the project
  • The exact type of ram you need or what kind of server you need and what you plan to use it for.

I’ll make a list of people interested in servers and I will attempt to match them up with servers as they become available.

Server update 2012-02-27

Sorry for being a whole week behind the scheduled update time! However, we’ve got a huge release here, which will hopefully make up for the delay!

Many thanks to Calvin Walton, Johannes Weißl, Ian McEwen, Michael Wiencek and the MusicBrainz developers for all their work on this release.

Bug

  • [MBS-1818] – UX issues with "Add Disc" feature
  • [MBS-2363] – Release editor: Release Duplicates tab doesn’t keep selection…
  • [MBS-2889] – Advanced tracklist edit: artist field is disabled by default for multi-disc VA releases
  • [MBS-2967] – Newly created artist not displayed in edit notes diff when changing release artist
  • [MBS-3027] – License attribute isn’t hidden when the relationship type is automatically changed
  • [MBS-3290] – User:Whatever links in /doc/ should point to wiki
  • [MBS-3659] – Can’t call method "statistic_names" on an undefined value
  • [MBS-3776] – YouTube Streaming autoselect doesn’t load the attribute
  • [MBS-4010] – Duplicate artist credits
  • [MBS-4043] – URL relationship type description not updating
  • [MBS-4133] – Internal server error editing recording
  • [MBS-4141] – "Add missing entities" tab breaks if you have to add a new label and have an existing artist
  • [MBS-4213] – Internal Server Error when adding a new release (Validation failed for ‘Maybe[Int]’ with value 22439.2)
  • [MBS-4269] – Wrong expansion for youtu.be URLs
  • [MBS-4280] – Translation.pm doesn’t check that $msgid is defined before regexing it
  • [MBS-4285] – Empty title returned instead of "0"
  • [MBS-4287] – Artist Country condition doesn’t load on edit search
  • [MBS-4288] – Recording tab in the RE no longer shows track ACs
  • [MBS-4290] – Regression on javascript inline search’s keyboard events
  • [MBS-4292] – License problem with excanvas.js
  • [MBS-4293] – "Get wiki versions" on transclusion table does nothing
  • [MBS-4295] – FreeDB importing chokes on double quotes
  • [MBS-4297] – Amazon referrer stuff not included in sidebar links
  • [MBS-4311] – Sort unlinked pseudo-releases report
  • [MBS-4333] – Release editor > Importing from CDStubs is broken
  • [MBS-4351] – URL Relations with ampersands in the URL aren’t being escaped in XML returned by the WebService API
  • [MBS-4352] – JS URL cleanup for recording licenses

Improvement

  • [MBS-942] – Link back to editor’s collections on the collection page
  • [MBS-1389] – Accept "X.XX" track times
  • [MBS-1435] – Show ISRC / ISWC in normal search
  • [MBS-1657] – "Change vote + add note" in edit page
  • [MBS-1961] – Display more information on "merge work" edits
  • [MBS-2086] – Aliases: separate localised aliases from other aliases
  • [MBS-2120] – Track parser needs to understand – (en dash) as an artist/title separator
  • [MBS-2392] – Track artist {credits} not shown on CD lookup
  • [MBS-2573] – Make add alias default to the current name
  • [MBS-2808] – Annotation wiki formatting syntax help is missing
  • [MBS-2957] – Hide duplicate labels and cat#s in recording / RG views
  • [MBS-3371] – Report: releases with non-consecutive medium numbers
  • [MBS-3398] – Detect "M" in front of track numbers
  • [MBS-3737] – Change the colour of the artist names on the advanced tracklist
  • [MBS-4044] – Cleanup Discogs URLs
  • [MBS-4135] – Display collection owner in release page’s collection tab
  • [MBS-4262] – gzipping of dynamic content could use extension to javascript and JSON
  • [MBS-4332] – "Add medium" edit display: Release and position fields should be at top rather than at bottom

New Feature

  • [MBS-3938] – Add a report to show artists that may have disambiguation strings in the artist name
  • [MBS-4081] – Report: pseudo-releases without transl*tion relationships
  • [MBS-4362] – Report: Recordings with Creative Commons Download relationships

Task

  • [MBS-2836] – Trim annotations in database
  • [MBS-3416] – Automatically delete release annotations that consist only of white space

A Git tag should be live later, but the commit is b5f45992a24bf.

New Style Leader and Updated Proposal Process

Nicolás Tamargo (reosarevok) is replacing Kuno Woudt (warp) as style leader. This will allow Kuno to fully concentrate on development, and also allow our other style leader Nikki to dedicate more of her time to testing changes and make it less likely for us to have botched releases.

We are also updating the proposal process, and tying it to the Jira tracker, to avoid the manual updating of the proposal table and problems with two people using the same proposal number by mistake. The updated system is at Proposals – the huge table there has been moved to Proposals/History

Server Update, 2012-02-06

We just finished pushing out an update last night, and sadly it didn’t go particularly smoothly. As part of ongoing efforts to try and fix the release editor, we temporarily made everything worse and ended up losing quite a lot of session data. I’m profusely sorry that this didn’t go better! We think things are stable again now though, so if you do see any bugs that you haven’t encountered before, please do make sure to let us know over at the bug tracker. Other than that, there were quite a few internal changes to our production setup in this release – we moved to a more modern Plack based setup and used our recent Carton packaging work. Here are the other bugs that got fixed. Thanks to Ian McEwan and Michael Wiencek for helping make this release happen!

Bug

  • [MBS-2112] – Using space as join word between two artists in a credit ends up with no space between them
  • [MBS-3677] – Recording page doesn’t highlight releases with pending edits or show disambiguation comments
  • [MBS-3949] – Lookup box not working on work-URL form
  • [MBS-4248] – Timeline graph doesn’t work due to poorly-escaped strings in JS
  • [MBS-3680] – Error 502 Bad Gateway loading certain releases from the webservice

Improvement

  • [MBS-343] – Lookup by MBID in inline searches
  • [MBS-4273] – WS should use ETags in order to save clients bandwidth (and us too)

New Feature

  • [MBS-4210] – Use separate robots.txt for staging and production servers

Task

  • [MBS-4189] – Display language zxx ("No linguistic content") in release editor form

Last.fm donates a 48-port gig switch!

Our friends at Last.fm just donated a 48 port gig switch to MusicBrainz! This new (to us) switch will allow us to shorten the update cycle for our indexed searches. Currently it takes about 3 hours to generate the indexes and to push them out to the search servers. With this new switch, we should be able to push the indexes quite a bit faster, which should shave off 60-90 minutes off our update cycle.

Thanks so much for the donation! Thanks to Adrian for making this happen in next to no time!