The VMWare image has been updated for the 2009-05-24 server release. The previous image was getting old and updating steps have been reported not easy.
The new image has been upgraded to Debian 5.0, includes a more recent Linux kernel and uses PosgreSQL 8.3 (the required version to work on NGS).
To download and play with the new image, read our VirtualMusicBrainzServer wiki page!
I just pushed a set of fixes to the main servers. To see what has changed, check out the recently closed bug list. More bug fixes will come later this week.
We’ve just finished rolling out our latest release to support Release Groups, ISRCs and CD Stub searching!
For all the details on this release, check out the release notes.
I would like to thank Luks, Dave Evans, Navap, Outsidecontext, Voiceinsideyou, Murdos, Pronik, Prodoc and everyone else who has helped put this release together! Thank you for all your hard work!
P.S. Happy Birthday to Matt Wood!
Welcome all Lifehacker users!
Unfortunately you picked a bad day to come inundate MusicBrainz, because today is our next server update. This will start very soon, within about half an hour of me posting this entry. We expect to be down for at least 30 minutes today.
Sorry for the inconvenience!
I just rolled out a few bug fixes and enhancements to the main server:
Many thanks to Luks, Nikki, Brianfreud and Navap for helping with these fixes/improvements.
This week MusicBrainz experienced problems while trying to deliver mail to gmail.com / googlemail.com. The problems started on Tuesday morning (UK time). On Friday morning the problem was identified as a broken DNS server, which was then fixed, thus resolving the problem.
Regrettably this means that some messages that MusicBrainz should have sent are now lost. The number of lost messages is approximately:
Please accept our apologies for this error.
We just completed pushing the latest changes out to the main servers! We had a bit of a bumpy ride to roll out the upgrade — we’re noticing quite a few problems with collections right now and the Last Update feature brought our database server to its knees. As a result, we’ve disabled the Dashboard — we’ll re-enable it once we figure out what the problem is.
If you encounter a problem with the server, please file a bug report and select the 2008-11-23 version. Also, please check the open bug list to see if your problem has been reported before.
For a complete list of things that changed for this release, please see the release page on the wiki.
This massive release was brought to you by the tireless efforts of: Luks, Murdos, Djce, Jugdish, Acid2, Niklas and myself. Loads and loads of good testing came from Voiceinsideyou and Nikki. Thanks to everyone who helped with this release!
Also, if you’ve used Jugdish’s enhanced voting GreaseMonkey script, please disable it as it may cause problems since that functionality was included in this server release.
Murdos has been busy merging the various development branches into trunk — thanks for your work. I’ve updated the test server with the latest codebase. Come check out the latest new features:
(to log in use your normal log in name and password ‘mb‘)
We’ve got more bug fixes coming in the next couple of weeks. Also, the next server release has been scheduled for 2008-11-23. As usual, please report bugs to our bug tracker.
UPDATE: I had to clear everyone’s collections because of a bug. That’s fixed now — please start over again.
UPDATE2: Due to complaints by stodgy brits, Music Newz is now called Music News. 
[ Before reading this post, make sure to read the previous NGS related post ]
The question that is on my mind right now is how to build a coherent roadmap that gets us from the mb_server codebase that we’re running today to the NGS codebase, complete with new edit system. The factors that play into this are:
Finally, the BBC has been keen on getting what they are calling Cultural Identifiers. This name is a bit of a misnomer — essentially it would be the release related portions of NGS. Release groupings that allows us a more product centric approach to managing releases. Right now we list and identify releases with different track layouts as totally separate releases, even though they ought to be properly related. The BBC wishes this work to happen sooner than later and have indicated that they would be willing to sponsor this work.
That’s awesome, right??
Well, yes. But there is one problem. In the last post we concluded that we should move to NGS in one fell swoop. And now the BBC would like us to take an intermediate step? As much as we agreed that moving to NGS in one step, I think we must work with our most visible partner. Since we are severely resource constrained (we have just enough money to hire a part time University student right now) I feel compelled to find a way to get the BBC what they want as soon as possible while accepting money from them to boost our development funds. Taking money from the BBC may allow us to accelerate our development schedule towards NGS. But at the same time, it may slow us down getting to NGS.
I’m very much looking for feedback on how to best make this happen and how to best accomplish all these goals. Do you think that adding an intermediary step in exchange for funds from the BBC is an acceptable compromise?
Sorry for the delay in continuing my MusicBrainz Server Roadmap updates — we’ve been wrestling with some server configuration nightmares…
I’ll start by giving some background on the Next Generation Schema (NGS). People have been calling for an improved schema that can intelligently handle classical music, proper artist attribution and support for packages of releases (among many other things). In 2005 we held a summit in Germany where we laid down some groundwork for the requirements for a new schema and created a first rough draft schema. Holes were quickly poked into that schema, but this let us find the weak points and let us do a better job of designing the schema for the next attempt. The next attempt was an invite only summit held in London in 2007, where we created a schema that should be pretty close to what we’re actually going to put in place.
Since then we’ve been debating how to make NGS a reality. And to say the least, its been a real pain so far. The change from the existing schema to NGS is a very large project and will be far from trivial. For instance, do we migrate to NGS in one step or take a few steps? Can we keep our existing edit system or do we need to rewrite it from scratch? Now that we have the schema done, what should the user interface look like? How can we make it simple for those users who want to do simple data changes? How can we allow more expert users to make all sorts of detailed changes while keeping the user interface simple? What would the best tools for building a new UI be?
To answer these questions, Lukáš has been working on the NGS playground in his spare time. The NGS playground is Lukáš’ attempt to answer these questions. So far, he has answered two questions:
In the process, Lukáš is trying out a bunch of new tools to see how they fare. He’s also working in Python to see if that is the proper language to move forward with. While I haven’t run the NGS playground yet, Lukáš has the schema finished except for the Works concept, which is pretty straightforward. Also, I believe that the script to convert an existing database to the new format is also done. However, Lukáš’ work is only a playground — its an attempt to see how we can pull off the user interface for NGS. That’s NGS in a nutshell today.
In my next post I will continue this thread with thoughts on how we go from today’s mb_server and the Template Toolkit work and move towards the NGS work that Lukáš is doing. For now, if you’re a computer geek who is interested in looking at NGS, please take a look at the NGS playground. There isn’t much documentation yet — so consider this a “some assembly required” project. We’re interested to hear your comments on the playground — please feel free to post them here.