Logbook, week 8 (2019-05)

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Development

Earlier this week, I released Funkwhale 0.18.1. This is a small bugfix release, following the big 0.18 release from two weeks ago, and you should upgrade your instance when you have a moment ;)

That being done, I started to focus on the 0.19 release, and especially on metadata management. What I call metadata is all the musical data revolving around audio content itself: license stuff, titles, dates, links to other platforms, etc.

Currently, we extract this data from audio files, during import, and there is no easy way to update it after that (for exemple to fix a typo, an error, or add a field that was missing). Moreover, since this data is federated, updating things locally could lead to discrepencies, or changes being erased if you update a local copy of something updated remotely.

To address that, I've opened a dedicated issue and tried to split the potential solution in small to medium size tasks. I think I have a pretty clear path forward, and the design I'm implementing will include auditability (who changed what, when?), and some wiki-like features (people can suggest a change, and people with the proper permissions can approve it).

Another thing I've been thinking about this week was how to bring Live Streaming to Funkwhale, a problem I've been trying to solve for a few months now. I now have a pretty-good high-level architecture to support this use case, it's summarized on a dedicated issue. I don't expect implementation itself will not start anytime soon, but it's good to know we can do that when we have the required bandwidth!

Finally, Wednesday afternoon, I took a few hours to implement a basic radio with recommendations based on other users history, based on a suggestion from @gordon. This led to an interesting thread about algorithms, curiosity, human-based curation, passivity and serendipity.

Project management

We're still waiting for feedback on the non-profit statuses. It's been a week now, and we could use more insight. I expect the topic to stay open for another week, then we'll rewrite our draft based on the discussions.

Funkwhale Sync #3 will happen in a week or two. If you want in, remember to fill in the date poll and suggest discussion topics. All the links can be found at https://socialhub.network/t/funkwhale-sync-3/321.

Personal

This week's energy was interesting, I have the feeling that multiple problems that were hard to solve have found a path to resolution. I'm also excited to start working on big features again, after three or four weeks on polishing/bugfix work!

I'm currently in Lyon, and will be leaving for Brussels in the afternoon. See you tomorrow at the Fosdem ths week-end if you're here :)