Hello all, I have an edit that ModBot took care of regarding an artist credit associated with a recording. One of the credits in it’s queue has "Feat. ". It addressed the artist credit correctly, but left the join phrase "Feat. " in-tact of course. I’m curious if anyone can help me understand the “flow” of the edit process. Just a broad understanding in order to grasp what’s going on for this case, or if you can direct me toward a buried piece of documentation possibly.
To give a better understanding of my own conflict; for instance, I know some open edits can fail due to their edits being a dependency. If I were to make a new edit in addition to my pending one that addresses the join phrase of the recording by prepending the space and fixing the title case to "Feat. ", will that fail when the current edit closes successfully, or will that be safe as nothing is being destroyed/merged/etc. and is not altering any artist but instead the join phrase?
if something gets change while there is an open edit the last edit made will take presence. but it will only change what was add or removed in the edit. if i understand what you are asking 
Can you give us links to the edits you’re talking about?
There is a test server where you can make these sorts of edits and then approve them without waiting the 6 days.
So… should I wipe out most of the content of https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Development/Sandbox and replace it with a link to this test.musicbrainz.org ?
The sandboxes were never a replacement for test.musicbrainz.org—in fact, the two things existed side by side while the sandboxes were still a thing.
The sandboxes were specifically for development, ie., a place for community members to run modified MBS code (or in some cases other MB related things) to test it out. test.musicbrainz.org is also (sometimes) for testing out code, but this code is sanctioned by MetaBrainz’ employed developers and has already been through code review—it’s not deployed as part of the code review. However, it is also a test bed for editors to try editing things in a throwaway database that won’t affect “real” data. If test.musicbrainz.org is to have its own wikipage, it should not live under “Development/”.
(Also, I moved Development/Sandbox to History: and tried to remove most references to that page elsewhere in the wiki. Sandboxes haven’t been a thing for years. 
)
Huh. I noticed that sandboxes page a year or two ago, when it was already out-of-date.
Guess I never really understood what “sandboxes” were about, because I thought the point of sandboxes was exactly what you described test.musicbrainz.org to be for.
In my case I’m (thinking about) developing a bot and wanting a place for my beta-version bot to do test edits and I was looking for a place to do this.
And from that perspective, “Development” seems like an appropriate category for it to be under.
But maybe you want “Development” to mean specifically “development of the musicbrainz server code”.
addendum:
test.musicbrainz.org does have a wikipage, in a manner of speaking, at https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Bots. What was missing was a link to that from the Development wiki page; now there is one.
sorry for the late reply, it was late that evening to begin with and I actually took the question to irc, and received fantastic help directly from reosarevok. Returning here I’m more than happy with the response, in addition to reminding me about using a test server, as well as the explanation of the sandboxes. All in all a win across the boards. 
To answer my own question for anyone returning, Yes, that edit will indeed fail as soon as any other pending ones successfully close. In my particular case it was because of multiple edits being done across multiple parameters. To alleviate future errors, not only have I learned a bit more about which edits affect others, but to also narrow the scope of such mass edits.
Test is good for testing stuff like editing or code that is not part of MusicBrainz server (MBS).
Sandboxes were good for testing code changes inside MBS itself, prior to or part of the code review of your MBS pull request (PR), because they could host your own MBS code.
Test and Sandboxes timeline
- We used to have test
- Then we had Sandboxes
- Test stopped working, but we still had Sandboxes
- Test was back
- Sandboxes stopped working (now)
Héhé 