August Community Revisit

Ohoi m’hearties, it’s time for the first monthly Community Revisit, where we’ll revisit what happened in MetaBrainzLand during the last month. Ready for the ride? Leggo!

The primary thing happening this month has likely been the changes in the MetaBrainz employee line-up following Ian’s departure in July. In the beginning of the month, Freso (wait, hey, that’s me!) was pulled on board as Community Manager (a brand new position for MetaBrainz too!), and just at the end of the month, GSoC wonder child Roman “Gentlecat” Tsukanov was hired as the new software engineer. So hi to us two! 🙂

Speaking of GSoC, the Google Summer of Code, this year’s edition is also fast coming to an end, and our four students and their projects are closing up and giving their work the final touches to have them ready to go live. Don’t be surprised if you hear more about these projects soon.

One thing that did go live during August, in no small part thanks to Ben “LordSputnik” Ockmore and Leo_Verto: the new IRC chat logger! Chat logs from IRC are now available at http://chatlogs.metabrainz.org/ – the site still needs some MetaBrainzifying, but Ben has done a great job of importing (pretty much) all the old chat logs to the new system and the bot is running in all the official MetaBrainz channels. If you’re on IRC (or you just like poking at the IRC logs), be sure to say “Thank you!! <3” to LordSputnik and Leo_Verto next time you see them around!

Another person who has made a mark in the last month was Alex a.k.a. caller#6, starting up the discussion about the current situation of MusicBrainz’ Area entities. Be sure to check out that blog post and let your voice be heard, if you don’t feel like it’s being represented already. The next instalment should be out before long.

We also had two server updates (pretty much all bug fixes) and an updated Virtual Machine image was finally released for the more tech oriented people.

This about rounds off the August Community Revisit. What do you think about the format? Did I miss any important community happenings? Any other comments? This is a brand new venture, so nothing’s set in stone yet!

From Denmark with love,
Freso

Schema change release, 2011-07-11

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:

  1. Take down the web server running MusicBrainz, if you’re running a web server.
  2. Turn off cron jobs if you are automatically updating the database via cron jobs.
  3. Set DB_SCHEMA_SEQUENCE to 13 in lib/DBDefs.pm
  4. Make sure your REPLICATION_TYPE setting is RT_SLAVE
  5. Switch to the new code with git fetch origin followed by git checkout v-20110711-schema-change
  6. Run ./upgrade.sh from the top of the source directory.
  7. Install the perl modules Algorithm::Merge and Algorithm::Diff
  8. Turn cron jobs back on, if needed.
  9. 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!

Bug

  • [MBS-1977] – ModBot is unable to close some edits
  • [MBS-1979] – Unable to edit a “later translated versions” relationship with change direction
  • [MBS-2026] – Subscribed artists open edits won’t load for editors with large amounts of subscriptions
  • [MBS-2442] – MB postgres unaccent extension overwrites unaccent.so library shipped with postgres-contrib
  • [MBS-2689] – Timeline isn’t working in Opera 10
  • [MBS-2698] – Some tables are not replicated through Live data feed
  • [MBS-2812] – Adding track times has caused a failed dependency for an edit which changed the track titles.
  • [MBS-2826] – Web service returns malformed XML (not escaped properly)
  • [MBS-2831] – “Edit medium” edit display: Artist credits changes are incorrect
  • [MBS-2974] – I don’t receive e-mail when someone votes no to my edit any more
  • [MBS-2981] – Changing the case of recording comments should be auto-edits
  • [MBS-2986] – tracklist_index was not populated during NGS
  • [MBS-2995] – Caught exception in MusicBrainz::Server::Controller::WS::2::ReleaseGroup->release_group_browse “Can’t call method “format”

Improvement

  • [MBS-1500] – Remove tracklist_index.tracks
  • [MBS-1707] – Advanced tracklist in RE: “Title” to “Disc title”
  • [MBS-2242] – Disable editing of Medium title when there’s only one medium
  • [MBS-2434] – Combine READWRITE and RAWDATA
  • [MBS-2462] – Other edit types that don’t highlight what has changed between old and new values
  • [MBS-2583] – “Edit Medium” should show you which medium is being edited with respect to the overall release
  • [MBS-2767] – Release-group XML result should include first release date