Server Release Notes / 20050418
Contents |
Changelog for the 2005-04-18 Server Release
List of new features and bug-fixes in the 2005-04-18 server release.
Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Users
Advanced Relationships
The much awaited Advanced Relationships feature is finally complete. Advanced Relationships allows the user to create a relationship between an Artist, Album, Track or URL. Each relationship may have optional attributes (e.g. instrument performed, guest performance) and/or a date range for which the links applies.
This feature is best explained with some examples:
- Artist - Artist relationship: The Edge is a member of U2
- Album - Artist relationship: Incendio has acoustic guitar performed by Jim Stubblefield
- Artist - Track relationship: Symphony No. 5 was conduced by Herbert von Karajan
- Artist - URL relationship: Morcheeba has a home page at: http://morcheeba.net/
To see a good example of what is possible with Advanced Relationships, take a look at the album Incendio. For complete documentation on the AdvancedRelationships feature, please see the Advanced Relationships Documentation on the wiki.
Artist changes
It is now possible to enter multiple artists with the same name. If you are adding an artist with the same (or very similar) name to an existing artist, you will be prompted to enter an artist comment. This short artist comment is used to differentiate this artist from other similar artists and will be shown whenever artists appear in a list and the user needs to chose the correct artist.
Artists can now also be differentiated as a Group or as a Person (via the add or edit artist pages). Artists can also have formed/born or dissolved/died dates (for groups and persons, respectively).
Moderating and Voting now requires a verified email address
As per discussion on the mb-users mailing list, users must now provide a verified email address in order to vote or moderate. Hopefully this will increase the communication between moderators and reduce the number of random voters.
New Preference: “Show ‘Inline’ Moderations”
Due to problems with some new moderators randomly voting NO on moderations, we have turned off showing random moderations in the inline moderation i-frame. The inline moderation feature is now only available to moderators who have had their account for more than two weeks and will be disabled by default.
If you do opt to be shown inline moderations, then they will no longer include moderations unrelated to the page you’re on. (Previously the system would select a moderation for the artist you’re looking at, or otherwise one of your subscribed artists, or otherwise a related artist, or otherwise any artist. Now that final part has been removed).
Miscellaneous
- JMP3R
ename and MP3Tag were added to the related projects page. - The completely out of date and improbable design for MusicBrainz II has been removed from the DB Structure pages. Please
- refer to the more up to date MusicBrainz database structure page.
- The funky “A” graphic that used to indicate an automoderation has been replaced by an (automod) text in a smaller font on the left hand side.
Changes mainly of interest to MusicBrainz Administrators
- InitDb.pl has been cleaned up a bit. You can now use it to create the database (and user, and language, etc) but with no tables in it: ./admin/InitDb.pl –createdb –empty-database.
- If you try to import the wrong tar files (where the schema sequence of the tar file doesn’t match that of your database), then previously MBImport.pl would decompress all of the tar files, then find the error (and then delete all the decompressed files). It now finds the error much sooner, without wasting all that time decompressing the tar files first.
- The Pending/PendingData tables are now built in to the main SQL scripts; all MusicBrainz databases (including replication masters, and replication slaves, and ones that aren’t replicating at all) will always include these tables.
Bugs and RFEs Closed
- 1005506 Support duplicate artist names
- 1026588 Silence TRM should be a special case
- 1092697 AR interface: Clicking swap left<=>right does a submit
- 1099399 AR: Can't add copies of a relationship with different dates
- 1103028 [AR] showurl gives "System Error"
- 1157640 Server doesn't always return ASINs