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Tag: development

Manifest Generation in Exherbo

Manifest Generation in Exherbo

In my own developer package repository, and in merge requests I have made recently to official Exherbo repositories, I have started to include Manifest files alongside the Exheres packaging. This post is an attempt to document how I have the tooling set up for semi-automatically generating manifests. The cave tool includes a cave digest subcommand which inherits the manifest generation code which had originally been developed for Gentoo. It can be used with Exherbo, but it requires some custom configuration…

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A MusicBrainz report on Pseudo-Releases

A MusicBrainz report on Pseudo-Releases

As an implementation of support for translating or transliterating the tracklists on foreign releases, MusicBrainz has something called “Pseudo-Releases.” They are meant to be used alongside the database entry for the original, real release to contain alternate tracklists. Unfortunately, many MusicBrainz users weren’t quite sure on when the “Pseudo-Release” status should be used, and incorrectly set it instead of the correct status like “Official”, “Bootleg”, or “Other” on some releases. And a few translated tracklists have the status set correctly—but…

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MusicBrainz contributions – Search result and stats improvements.

MusicBrainz contributions – Search result and stats improvements.

I’m pleased to see that two of my MusicBrainz contributions have been merged in time for the 2012-01-26 server update, and are now live on the site! The first change isn’t exactly visible to the naked eye, but it should hopefully provide improvements in the Google Search result listings for MusicBrainz artist pages by providing a nicely formatted <meta description> tag to help Google (and other search engines, of course) list a more relevant “snippit” of the page in the…

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Vala Bindings for libmusicbrainz4

Vala Bindings for libmusicbrainz4

When developing Riker, I had a bit of a choice – I could either write (from scratch) a new library to interface with the MusicBrainz XML webservice, or I could create bindings to access the existing libmusicbrainz library from within Vala. Up to today, I’ve gone a little ways down both paths, and both have problems. If I write new bindings from scratch, they’ll have some nice features like integrating into the Glib main loop, and automatically determining proxy settings from the…

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Mercurial Frustrates Me

Mercurial Frustrates Me

Maybe I’m just used to having too much power at my fingertips. Git was designed, from the ground up, to provide operations to do absolutely anything to a repository, right down to the most basic level of manually creating individual objects in the repository. Using user-visible command-line tools that can be operated from scripts. It is literally possibly to reimplement most of the user visible Git commands (such as “commit”!) using shell scripts and some of the more-basic Git “plumbing”…

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