MusicBrainz Blog

Last week’s search server release had some bugs that we decided should be fixed sooner than later. Paul Taylor rose to the challenge and fixed 4 important bugs and we just finished releasing the updated code. Thanks for your efforts, Paul!

Release Notes – MusicBrainz Search Server – Version 2013-04-04

Bug

• [SEARCH-279] – Seach server returning wrong results
• [SEARCH-280] – Artist search DAVID BOWIE → FRANZ SCHUBERT (score 100) !? Bowie (score 0)
• [SEARCH-281] – If set explain=true option with dismax search it actually does a non-indexed search

Improvement

• [SEARCH-267] – Create new rewrite method for Dismax FuzzySearch

Part 2 in our housecleaning series concerns our mailing lists. Hosting mailing lists is quite a pain and we’d rather leave this pain to people who specializein mailing lists. So, we are proposing to do the following things:

1. Remove the under-utilized list musicbrainz-italian.
2. Remove the musicbrainz-commits mailing list. Github (and similar sites) have better notification systems, so we don’t really need this list anymore.
3. Ask the Xiph Foundation to find a new home for the XSPF Playlist mailing list.
4. Remove the under-utilized musicbrainz-users list since the forums are predominantly used for end-user discussion. We’ll point people to the forums for those.

Finally, we would like to get some suggestions and feedback on where we should host our mailing lists. We’re considering:

• Nabble: This has gotten mixed reviews from various users.
• Librelist: This site is quite new and UI reservations have been noted about it.
• Savannah: This site has many more features than just mailing lists. We’re not certain if we can move only our mailing lists here.
• Google Groups: We’ve heard complaints about spam and spam fighting tools. Has this improved recently?

If you have any comments on any of these solutions or proposed list consolidation ideas, please let us know. Also, if you know of a cheap/free/good list provider that we didn’t list, please let us know!

We have one aging machine (scooby) that has been in continuous service since 2006. Back then we didn’t have as many options for hosting source code, mailing lists and blogs. Today, we have a lot more choice and we’re opting to host fewer things so that we can focus our energy on hosting MusicBrainz and not a bunch of ancillary stuff. Our goal is to retire scooby soon and move the services that run on that server elsewhere.

Our blog is the first thing to move: We’re moving it to wordpress.com and we’re nearly done with the move. But, we dont have a decent wordpress MusicBrainz theme for our blog. If anyone is interested in taking an existing wordpress theme and making it a custom MusicBrainz theme, we would love your help!

If you’re interested, please leave a comment and we’ll get in touch with you to coordinate this process.

Thanks!

Digital West, our ISP, will be doing some router maintenance on December 30, at 12:01am Pacific Time. We may experience 1-2 minutes of loss of connectivity around that time.

For once, the problem will not be us.

We’ve just updated our search servers with a new release. This release adds support for a new improved json format for the search server and will be publicly available after the next mbserver release. We also now output the date (in the XML/json) the index was last updated so you know how old the results received are. This will be exposed to the end-user in the web search results in an upcoming release of musicbrainz-server.

Thanks to Paul Taylor and Aurélien Mino for making this release happen!

Improvement

• [SEARCH-232] – Search server should return information about when the indexes were last updated

New Feature

• [SEARCH-226] – Add Support for Json format as described in http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/User:kuno/Web_Service/JSON
• [SEARCH-227] – Add prettyprint option for Json (and XML)

The maintenance we were doing is complete. You can safely resume editing now.

We have a minor hosting change to make (change how an instance of memcached is managed) that will lose all of the current release editor sessions. We will make this change tomorrow, Thursday at 20:00 UTC. During this time, any release editor session that is active will break and you will lose your changes in the release editor. To prevent this from impacting you, make sure to submit any changes before 20:00 UTC and wait for us to post another entry saying that the change is complete.

The rest of the site will be unaffected by this change.

I’d like to apologize for replication packet 61163 — our release created a very large replication packet (4.9Mb) that is going to take a while for clients to apply. Users using our slave software (musicbrainz-server and mbslave) can expect to see a much longer loading time and much greater use of disk space when this packet is applied.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

We’re debugging some insidious database deadlock issue and we think we have a clue where the problems are coming from. In an effort to get the site stable, we’re going to disable the function that keeps track if a piece of data has edits pending or not.

If you’re editing, please disregard these indicators as they are likely to be wrong. We’re going to work up a permanent solution for this problem, but it is unlikely that we will have this solved before mid-next week.

Sorry for the troubles!

Hi!

We’re experiencing some database issues and we’re working to add more some redundancy to our setup. We will be offline for a few minutes starting at 1900UTC.

Sorry for the inconvenience!