Notes from #MetaBrainz Meeting 2022-02-07

[Freso]

MetaBrainz Meeting 2022-02-07

Meeting start: IRC Logs for #metabrainz | MetaBrainz Chatlogs

Periodic Table Monday

The Periodic Table Song (2018 Update!) | SCIENCE SONGS

Agenda

• Intro of @atj
• Reviews
• GSoC Ideas List
• Google Fonts (ORG-51)
• git branches auto-deletion
• Valentine’s Day meeting

Last meeting: 2022-01-31
Next meeting: 2022-02-14

Intro of @atj

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@rob

I wanted to go first and welcome @atj to our team!
You know @atj – he’s been helping us for months now.
thank you for that!
and he wanted to jump in a bit more and approached me about giving some of his time pro bono
in order to help @Zas – because @zas has too much stuff to do and @atj saw that.
this is also for the clarification of our privacy policy – I wanted to be able to write a 1GBP value contract so that we can give atj access to our infrastructure and not violate our privacy policy.
that said, I should caution that @atj will not be spending as much time on the project as others here – he still has a day job.
so, welcome @atj!

Reviews

@atj

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@atj

thanks to everyone for making me feel so welcome, and thanks in particular to @rob and @zas for being receptive to my offer and making the process very straightforward
I’ve wanted to help out on the infra side for some time, but that wasn’t possible due to the privacy issues as mentioned by @rob, so this seemed like a good solution.
anyway, I have some time with @zas tomorrow and I’ve been reading the syswiki, but it’s going to take me some time to become familiar with how things work etc.
so don’t expect me to be too helpful for a while. My main concern at this stage is not making more work for @zas
I think that’s it really, I’m just looking forward to being able to work closer with everyone and hopefully make peoples lives easier.

@lucifer

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@lucifer

I worked with @alastairp last week to finalize and deploy the last bits of user_id stuff.
no manual intervention is needed now when a user wants their musicbrainz user name to be changed.
I worked on porting the recording similarity queries to spark and had a few discussions about it with @rob.
also reviewed a couple of CB PRs for Ansh.
thank you for the contributions, Ansh !
there were some stale CB PRs too which I picked up yesterday and finished.
other than that dealt with bugs resulting from user id deployment.

@alastairp

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@alastairp

as @lucifer said, we rolled out the last of the user id stuff, and also merged and released all of the documentation that was worked on over doc week
as a result, we got under 1 page of PRs!
with @mr_monkey we fixed a bug in the format of playlists and how they’re showed on LB
@mr_monkey, @rob and I had a good discussion earlier in the week working out some next steps for MetaBrainz/RecommendationBrainz, the biggest result was deciding to stop work on AB, as we can see that it’s not bringing us the kind of results that we want, and we think that we don’t have the resources or experience to build it
so this turned into a discussion about what we can save from the project, and how we can continue to bring interesting recommendation tools to *Brainz
the big realisation being that for 90% of what we want to do, we have an amazing data resource in MB and LB
the concept of AB works well for “the long tail”, the stuff that isn’t popular, but the amount of work to make this happen is wayyyyyy more than the easy stuff, so we want to focus on that first and see what comes out. @mr_monkey can talk a bit more about what he’s been doing
so off the back of that conversation, I started a few PRs to shut down some parts of AB (data submission), and drafted a blog post, and had a few discussions on the forum

@mr_monkey

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@mr_monkey

One my side of this discussion, we talked about how to transfer some of how to tag recordings by mood in MusicBrainz, and how to make it easy and enticing for users to add tags/genres/moods in ListenBrainz.
I’ve been reading papers about mood classification and how it relates to music, as well as the research being done on music mood recognition.
It’s a fascinating and complex subject matter. now I’m trying to apply all this and reduce it to a usable mood tagging interface that we can use in LB (and MB)
Apart from taht I also did a lot of PR Reviewing, and helping contributors with ongoing projects
Spent a bit of time on the design system
And we moved around some services in order to do some server maintenance
Apart from what has been mentioned before, that is all !

@akshaaatt

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@akshaaatt

Last week I had a meeting with the MB team and we discussed how we need to revamp MB in small chunks for better reviews
So I started to advance on that and along the way we integrated the design system into MB!
@metabrainz/design-system - npm is available as an npm package now!
After that I automated the release process and then some other configurations
So far the majority of the work is done and we can start relaxing and simply adding small components which is great!
Then I had some discussion with yellowhatpro who has been working on the android app lately
Great work going on!

@bitmap

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@bitmap

last week I spent most of my time on code review and helping with various PRs, particularly related to the homepage revamp and design-system
but also updated some MBS ones & helped debug some issues in the release merge page React-conversion one
later in the week I submitted a couple refactoring PRs to fix Flow-upgrade issues and remove some deprecated Perl module that spams warnings
besides that I spent time time cleaning up some schema change PRs for tag & area_containment triggers, & release_coverart removal

@reosarevok

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@reosarevok

I was mostly working on documenting our tests (which of course also meant finding some bugs in our tests)
I’m nowhere near done, but I’ll keep working on it a folder or so at a time
Once we know what we do test we’ll also have a better understanding of what we don’t, and we can add it
Also, instead of 50 lines of 1 ok, 2 ok, etc now the tests say what they’re doing, which feels great
Other than that, I worked with @CatQuest on the how-to-be-an-instrument-person document, which is pretty much done
And with @drsaunde on the how-to-request-areas document, which is also almost done

@CatQuest

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@CatQuest

I’ve been working on instrument documentation, the page is basically done and now only will need flisespikkeri, thanks so much to @reosarevok for helping to rewrite my ramblings!
I hope to finish that up and have it uploaded to… wherever?
This week I will be working on instruments and tagging moar music

@zas

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@zas

Last week, I worked mainly on Picard, PR reviews, patches, code cleanup
I was away for a personal reason on Tuesday
We received a notice about hardware issue on clash, so we organized to move services from/to it to let me reboot and patch the issue (firmware)
that went smoothly thanks to everyone that participate
apart that, usual supervision, upgrades, user support, that’s it for me.

@yvanzo

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@yvanzo

Some maintenance operations too last week: RabbitMQ move, SolrCloud 503s.
I improved the script I earlier submited to help with updating MB search indexes.
Submitted another script to collect logs for maintainers, now making it work for macOS too.
Looked into Solr 8 update, reviewed PRs, triaged tickets.
Also started deploying an MBS mirror instance for VolumIO.

@rob

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@rob

last week was loads of AB discussions and LB roadmaps, contracts with atj and doing some hacking around recording similarity.
then I also hacked on LB’s MB metadata cache and did a proof of concept of a standalone app that displays now playing info – that looked quite promising.
today I prepped for our board meeting tomorrow and did more SQL hacking and stuff.

@Freso

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@Freso

I didn’t do all that much last week. Got my booster shot Tuesday and took Wed and Thurs off. I spent a bunch of time whacking spam accounts with the new flag on Friday. Thank you @reosarevok and @bitmap and @yvanzo for getting that in.

GSoC Ideas List

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@lucifer

it is that time of the year again, GSoC org applications have opened today. The deadline is Feb 21. We need to get an ideas list before that.
The usual ideas guide:
Defining a Project (Ideas List) | Google Summer of Code Guides
I have also created wiki pages for 2022 ideas list.
Development/Summer of Code/2022 - MusicBrainz Wiki
please update the lists and add new ideas!

Google Fonts (ORG-51)

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@lucifer

so recently linking to Google Fonts has been ruled as a violation of GDPR (see associated ticket for a read on the topic)
@rob had a few ideas on how to respond to this.

@rob

so, this is not the last time this will happen. this will happen for more CDN hosted things.
but for now, lets figure out if our projects do use google fonts.
(@lucifer: re the projects using google fonts, here’s a prelimary list: code search)
@mr_monkey: was that part of the standard design?
(@mr_monkey: Yes. Not sure if the link to it was part of the Lobes bootstrap theme, but I believe so.)
we should move those fonts to staticbrainz first.
then each of the projects should update their links.
project leads: please open a ticket for someone on your project to address this ticket.
@lucifer: can you do the moving of the affected fonts to staticbrainz and then let people know the new location?

@alastairp mentioned that “after fonts, it might be a good idea to review other external links too” and there was some brief comments about known 3rd party vendor JS scripts being used in other projects.

git branches auto-deletion

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@yvanzo

This is for repository maintainers.
There are a lot of obsolete branches wandering around.
It might make sense to enable the option “Automatically delete head branches” for most repositories, especially, the ones that have only one important branch.
For MBS, I’m not sure this is possible, given there is ‘beta’ and ‘production’.
Would it be alright to enable it otherwise? (I think about syswiki, guidelines, metabrainz.org, etc.)
(@zas: I’ll see for Picard, we have a lot of dead branches, but in general I think that’s ok)
For Picard it is probably not a good idea either indeed.
In general, if you have more than one important branch, don’t enable it.

@Freso asked whether it was possible to protect multiple branches, but @yvanzo wasn’t sure how that works with the auto-deletion.

Valentine’s Day meeting

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@Freso

Today’s the 7th and in 7 days it’ll be the 14th. Idk if anyone has plans for any kind of celebration or anything on this day but we also don’t really have any precedent for what we do at this date, so…
Anyone who know they won’t be around?
Or should we just go ahead with meeting?

Most people seemed to be going to be around, so meeting next Monday as per usual.

[selflessself]

GSoC org applications have opened today. The deadline is Feb 21. We need to get an ideas list before that. […] please update the lists and add new ideas

For LB/MB, I would really like to see this one solved seeing as LB will be of increasing importance in MB’s future: https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-11586 (could very well be too complex for GSoC)

For BB, I recently found out that Goodreads retired its API. Maybe BB should find out what Goodreads had that it does not and replicate it? Seems like a lot of people were really mad. I’m not sure if this is within GSoC scope.