Search Results: "Stein Magnus Jodal"

30 April 2016

Stein Magnus Jodal: March and April contributions

The following is a short summary of my open source work in March and April, almost like in previous months, except that I haven t spent as much time as previously on Open Source the last two months.

Debian

Mopidy
  • Bugfixes for the upcoming Mopidy 2.0.1 (which should have been released a long time ago): merged PR #1455, created PR #1493.
  • Started on, but didn t finish, fixing the Travis CI setup for Mopidy-GMusic.
  • Upgraded the Mopidy project server from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS. Rebuilt the discuss.mopidy.com Discourse/Docker instance.
  • Accepted Lars Kruse as the new maintainer of Mopidy-Beets. Thanks!
  • The extensions still in need of a new maintainer are: If you re a user of any of these and want to contribute, please step up. Instructions can be found in the README of any of these projects.

1 March 2016

Stein Magnus Jodal: February contributions

The following is a short summary of my open source work in February, just like in previous months.

Debian

Mopidy
  • Released Mopidy-Spotify 2.3.1: Works around search being broken in libspotify by using the Spotify Web API for the search functionality, and nothing else.
  • Wrapped up and released Mopidy 2.0 release. This was a quite large release that ports to GStreamer 1.x and adds support for gapless playback. It was uploaded to Debian in time to be part of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
  • Released Mopidy-Spotify 3.0.0: A couple of small compatibility fixes to work with Mopidy 2.x and GStreamer 1.x.
  • Updates to packages not in Debian, only at apt.mopidy.com:
    • Uploaded mopidy-spotify-tunigo 1.0.0-0mopidy1. Far down the chain, it depends on libspotify, which is not in Debian.
    • Uploaded mopidy-spotify 2.0.0-0mopidy1.
  • Updated homebrew-mopidy with lots of new releases:
    • Mopidy 2.0.0
    • Mopidy-Dirble 1.3.0
    • Mopidy-SoundCloud 2.0.2
    • Mopidy-Spotify 2.3.0, 2.3.1 and 3.0.0
    • python-backports-abc 0.4
    • python-backports-ssl-match-hostname 3.5.0.1
    • python-certifi 2015.11.20.1
    • python-cffi 1.5.0 and 1.5.2
    • python-requests 2.9.1
    • python-singledispatch 3.4.0.3
    • python-six 1.10.0
    • python-tornado 4.3
  • Rebased my feature/py3-compat branch on top of Mopidy 2.0.
  • Planned breaking changes for Mopidy 3.0: unbundling of Mopidy.js, removal of deprecated core APIs, model APIs, audio APIs and removal of the http/static_dir config.
  • Planned breaking changes to modernize Mopidy.js: change default calling convention to by-position-or-by-name, replace When.js with ES6 Promise, replace Bane.js with EventEmitter, and replace Buster.js with Karma+Mocha.

Comics
  • Started working on the upgrade to Django 1.8. Most deps are upgraded. The major remaining pieces is to upgrade django-registration from 0.8 to 2.0 and to replace the years-old vendored copy of django-invitation (singular) with django-invitations (plural).

18 February 2016

Stein Magnus Jodal: A guide to poor API management

This is the story of libspotify, as experienced by a Spotify customer and libspotify developer for six years.

Step 1: Support your API for years Since April 2009, libspotify has been a mostly nice although proprietary C library for integrating with the Spotify music streaming service, providing both music metadata and full playback capabilities. Language wrappers have been written for a plenitude of programming languages (including my own pyspotify). libspotify is integrated into numerous open source projects (including my own Mopidy), networked AV receivers, and rumour has it: even cars. In addition to being closed source, there was another catch: in order to use it, you need the Spotify premium subscription. Speaking from my own experience supporting a project integrating with Spotify for the last six years: lots of end users upgraded to premium in order to use the projects built on top of libspotify.

Step 2: Stop accepting bug reports and stop releasing updates In May 2012, Spotify released libspotify 12.1.51 for all supported architectures, which now even included Android. After months of endless requests from the quickly growing hoards of Raspberry Pi users, Spotify released libspotify 12.1.103 for hardfloat armv6 on January 22 2013. The release included minor API additions, like the addition of explicit lyrics and means for accepting Spotify s Terms of Service. The additions in 12.1.103 never reached the other supported architectures and 12.1.51 remains the last release for those. There was no clear communication about this being the end of libspotify, releases have just ceased. libspotify has not been mentioned in a single developer blog post or developer email newsletter since. That s now more than three years ago.

Step 3: Create new APIs Over the next couple of years Spotify released a new Web API and iOS and Android SDKs. Through their developer blog, they communicated quite a bit both about these and about the deprecation of the apps inside the Spotify desktop client. Here are some pieces from their developer blog to illustrate: The Web API grew steadily, as documented by the Web APIs changelog. Over time, its feature list improved, supporting anonymous endpoints for generic music metadata as well as OAuth protected endpoints for managing your own music collection and playlists. The only major part missing that prevented developers replacing libspotify was music playback, as the Web API only provides 30 second previews. From what I recall of 2014 IRC discussions with Spotify employees, they had built a new much smaller library for streaming music. The iOS and Android SDKs were simply platform specific wrappers around this new playback library and the new Web API. My impression is that, after a number of beta releases, the iOS and Android SDKs seamlessly replaced libspotify on those platforms. The plan was apparently to release the new playback library for desktop too, so that it, in combination with the Web API, could replace libspotify there as well. That was all back in 2014.

Step 4: Deprecate old APIs At some point, Spotify deprecated their old web API, the Metadata API. There was no blog post about it and it was not mentioned in any Spotify Developer News email I ve received in recent years. I guess they only published this fact as a note on the Metadata API web page; it is therefore hard to track down exactly when it was deprecated and how the deprecation was communicated. Anyway, it was deprecated, and the natural upgrade path was to the new Web API. Spotify even has a migration guide mapping the concepts of the Metadata API to the new Web API. All good. In May 2015, after 28 months without a single release or any news, libspotify is officially deprecated. The communication channel of choice? A note on the libspotify web page. No post on the developer blog. No Spotify Developer News email. To be able to use libspotify, all developers have registered and requested a personal application key. To my knowledge, none of these registered library users were notified directly.

Step 5: Shut down an old API On January 20 2016 Spotify end-of-lifed their Metadata API. I don t know if this date was communicated on the Metadata API web page well in advance of this shutdown. There s no blog post on the topic. There s no news email. There s no tweet from @SpotifyPlatform or @SpotifyStatus. I can t find anything except users commenting on various Spotify documentation pages that the text is outdated because the API is no longer merely deprecated, but entirely shut down. Hopefully they did publish the shutdown date ahead of time. It had a full replacement API and a migration guide. Fair and square. Nothing much to complain about here. It s time to get porting your code to the Web API! But frankly, I don t really care about this Metadata API because I don t use the Metadata API, do I?

Step 6: Break your API without warning February 3 2016, Mopidy users start reporting General transient error when searching Spotify. This is a libspotify error message known as SP_ERROR_OTHER_TRANSIENT with error code 16. This error usually means that there is some unspecified issue with the Spotify service. We ve actually seen it before and like its name suggests, it is indeed transient and soon goes away. According to a series of tweets between my fellow Mopidy developer Nick Steel and @SpotifyCares it appears that the libspotify search functionality was backed by the Metadata API s search functionality. Who knew? I m not aware of any relation between these APIs ever being mentioned publicly. No libspotify user could possibly have known that the Metadata API shutdown would affect them. Let s summarize: libspotify hasn t had any releases for three years and it was officially deprecated in May last year. But, there have been no warnings about any shutdown. The libspotify project is likely no longer staffed at all. Did someone just forget that libspotify depended on the Metadata API they were shutting down? Many newer networked AV receivers use the Spotify Connect libraries that are exclusive to Spotify s commercial partners. But some receivers probably still use libspotify. If so, did Spotify just break hardware sold with Spotify support as a major feature? Something that people are paying a monthly fee to use? It seems they did! In the Spotify Community forums there are numerous reports of broken devices and software that all have two things in common: the date the problem started occurring, and that search is the only feature that is broken. Surely, Spotify will quickly explain themselves and fix this?

Step 7: Stay quiet Since the API shutdown, Spotify has been very quiet. No posts on the developer blog. No email newsletter. No tweets from @SpotifyPlatform since December 1 last year. Some users at The Spotify Community forum are quoting responses from Spotify. Most responses seem to link to the Metadata API migration docs and state that application developers must migrate. In other cases the responses point the finger at the commercial partner which only adds to the confusion. Some of these devices may use the Metadata API directly, and in those cases the application maintainers are probably to blame. However, I m quite certain that the libspotify search issue is responsible for a fair share of these complaints. libspotify, in contrast to the Metadata API, has never been officially shut down. The responsibility for any breakage caused by libspotify is Spotify s alone.

What I want from Spotify
  1. Apologize to your paying customers and supporters.
  2. Get substantially better at communicating deprecations and shutdowns. We want all news, not just good news.
  3. Give us a new supported C library for audio playback. Now! Not later this year. I ve heard that promise for three consecutive years now. We can live with pre-release software quality initially. Getting the library out sooner rather than later shows us that there is a road ahead for all the projects that stream music from Spotify. Let us get started making new language wrappers.
  4. Release Spotify Connect specifications and libraries. We want to make music players that can be controlled by the Spotify mobile app. We want to make music controllers that can play music on all the Spotify Connect software and hardware players we ve invested in. You ve created this technology, now let us use it.
Thanks to Nick Steel for reviewing this blog post.

1 February 2016

Stein Magnus Jodal: January contributions

The following is a short summary of my open source work in January, just like I did back in November and December.

Debian

Mopidy
  • PR #1381: Made lookup() ignore tracks without URI.
  • Updated docs for Raspberry Pi installation to match Raspbian jessie.
  • Rewrote docs for running Mopidy as a service, more focused on systemd than Debian specifics to also cater for Arch users.
  • PR #1397: Added missing MPD volume command.
  • Merged a bunch of contributed fixes and released Mopidy 1.1.2.
  • Updated all extensions hosted under the Mopidy GitHub organization with either the name of the primary maintainer or a call for a new maintainer. The extensions in need of a new maintainer are: If you re a user of any of these and want to contribute, please step up. Instructions can be found in the README of any of these projects.
  • The feature/gst1 branch is complete as far as I know. There are no known regressions from Mopidy 1.1.2. PR #1419 is hopefully the last iteration of the pull request and GStreamer 1.x support will land in Mopidy 1.2.
  • Wrapping up the 1.2 release is now the focus. We might want to include this in Debian/Ubuntu before the Ubuntu 16.04 import freeze February 18, depending on feedback over the next week or two.

Comics
  • Added one new crawler.
  • Released comics 2.4.2.
  • Merged one new crawler and a crawler update.

12 January 2016

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (November and December 2015)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

1 January 2016

Stein Magnus Jodal: December contributions

The following is a short summary of my open source work in December, following up on my first report in November.

Debian

Mopidy
  • The feature/gst1 branch: Finished porting Mopidy from GStreamer 0.10 to PyGI and GStreamer 1.x. Merge of the branch is currently blocked on a single test failure (test_gapless) and issues with transitioning from one track to another with Mopidy-Spotify, which is the only backend using an appsrc for playback. The goal is for this branch to be part of Mopidy 1.2, which I hope to have in Debian/Ubuntu before the Ubuntu 16.04 import freeze February 18.
  • The feature/py3-compat branch: I ve worked quite a bit on this private branch, frequently rebased on top of feature/gst1. Currently Mopidy starts without any crashes on Python 3 and the test suite is down to 262 failed and 1841 passed tests. My current thinking, is that this will become part of a Mopidy 2.0 release, which will support both Python 2.7 and 3.4+. As soon as most of Mopidy s extension ecosystem supports Python 2+3, a new Mopidy major release (3.0?) will drop Python 2 support.
  • Merged a bunch of pull requests, both targeting the 1.1.2 bug fix release and the 1.2 feature release.

30 November 2015

Stein Magnus Jodal: November contributions

The following is a short summary of my open source work in November. My hope is that keeping better track of what I m doing will help me reflect on how I spend my time, and help me to focus my efforts better.

Debian

Mopidy
  • Released Mopidy-Spotify 2.2.0: Fixes related to duplicate Starred playlists and albums from year 0.
  • Moved Mopidy s Travis CI testing from Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 14.04, to prepare for GStreamer 1.x, and eventually testing with Python 3.4. PR #1341
  • Worked on porting Mopidy from GStreamer 0.10 to PyGI and GStreamer 1.x. PR #1339
  • Briefly looked at what remains to get Mopidy running on both Python 2.7 and 3.4+ when we ve landed the port to GStreamer 1.x. Doesn t look too bad, except that ConfigParser doesn t want to work with bytes in Python 3, so there s no easy way to read a config file referring to a path on a non-UTF-8 file system.

Comics
  • Fixed two old crawlers. Added two new crawlers.
  • Needs to upgrade to Django 1.8 before the Django 1.7 security support ends this December.

11 November 2015

Bits from Debian: New Debian Developers and Maintainers (September and October 2015)

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months: The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months: Congratulations!

4 May 2015

Lunar: Reproducible builds: first week in Stretch cycle

Debian Jessie has been released on April 25th, 2015. This has opened the Stretch development cycle. Reactions to the idea of making Debian build reproducibly have been pretty enthusiastic. As the pace is now likely to be even faster, let's see if we can keep everyone up-to-date on the developments. Before the release of Jessie The story goes back a long way but a formal announcement to the project has only been sent in February 2015. Since then, too much work has happened to make a complete report, but to give some highlights: Lunar did a pretty improvised lightning talk during the Mini-DebConf in Lyon. This past week It seems changes were pilling behind the curtains given the amount of activity that happened in just one week. Toolchain fixes We also rebased the experimental version of debhelper twice to merge the latest set of changes. Lunar submitted a patch to add a -creation-date to genisoimage. Reiner Herrmann opened #783938 to request making -notimestamp the default behavior for javadoc. Juan Picca submitted a patch to add a --use-date flag to texi2html. Packages fixed The following packages became reproducible due to changes of their build dependencies: apport, batctl, cil, commons-math3, devscripts, disruptor, ehcache, ftphs, gtk2hs-buildtools, haskell-abstract-deque, haskell-abstract-par, haskell-acid-state, haskell-adjunctions, haskell-aeson, haskell-aeson-pretty, haskell-alut, haskell-ansi-terminal, haskell-async, haskell-attoparsec, haskell-augeas, haskell-auto-update, haskell-binary-conduit, haskell-hscurses, jsch, ledgersmb, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, libarchive-tar-wrapper-perl, libbusiness-onlinepayment-payflowpro-perl, libcapture-tiny-perl, libchi-perl, libcommons-codec-java, libconfig-model-itself-perl, libconfig-model-tester-perl, libcpan-perl-releases-perl, libcrypt-unixcrypt-perl, libdatetime-timezone-perl, libdbd-firebird-perl, libdbix-class-resultset-recursiveupdate-perl, libdbix-profile-perl, libdevel-cover-perl, libdevel-ptkdb-perl, libfile-tail-perl, libfinance-quote-perl, libformat-human-bytes-perl, libgtk2-perl, libhibernate-validator-java, libimage-exiftool-perl, libjson-perl, liblinux-prctl-perl, liblog-any-perl, libmail-imapclient-perl, libmocked-perl, libmodule-build-xsutil-perl, libmodule-extractuse-perl, libmodule-signature-perl, libmoosex-simpleconfig-perl, libmoox-handlesvia-perl, libnet-frame-layer-ipv6-perl, libnet-openssh-perl, libnumber-format-perl, libobject-id-perl, libpackage-pkg-perl, libpdf-fdf-simple-perl, libpod-webserver-perl, libpoe-component-pubsub-perl, libregexp-grammars-perl, libreply-perl, libscalar-defer-perl, libsereal-encoder-perl, libspreadsheet-read-perl, libspring-java, libsql-abstract-more-perl, libsvn-class-perl, libtemplate-plugin-gravatar-perl, libterm-progressbar-perl, libterm-shellui-perl, libtest-dir-perl, libtest-log4perl-perl, libtext-context-eitherside-perl, libtime-warp-perl, libtree-simple-perl, libwww-shorten-simple-perl, libwx-perl-processstream-perl, libxml-filter-xslt-perl, libxml-writer-string-perl, libyaml-tiny-perl, mupen64plus-core, nmap, openssl, pkg-perl-tools, quodlibet, r-cran-rjags, r-cran-rjson, r-cran-sn, r-cran-statmod, ruby-nokogiri, sezpoz, skksearch, slurm-llnl, stellarium. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed: Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues but not all of them: Patches submitted which did not make their way to the archive yet: Improvements to reproducible.debian.net Mattia Rizzolo has been working on compressing logs using gzip to save disk space. The web server would uncompress them on-the-fly for clients which does not accept gzip content. Mattia Rizzolo worked on a new page listing various breakage: missing or bad debbindiff output, missing build logs, unavailable build dependencies. Holger Levsen added a new execution environment to run debbindiff using dependencies from testing. This is required for packages built with GHC as the compiler only understands interfaces built by the same version. debbindiff development Version 17 has been uploaded to unstable. It now supports comparing ISO9660 images, dictzip files and should compare identical files much faster. Documentation update Various small updates and fixes to the pages about PDF produced by LaTeX, DVI produced by LaTeX, static libraries, Javadoc, PE binaries, and Epydoc. Package reviews Known issues have been tagged when known to be deterministic as some might unfortunately not show up on every single build. For example, two new issues have been identified by building with one timezone in April and one in May. RD and help2man add current month and year to the documentation they are producing. 1162 packages have been removed and 774 have been added in the past week. Most of them are the work of proper automated investigation done by Chris West. Summer of code Finally, we learned that both akira and Dhole were accepted for this Google Summer of Code. Let's welcome them! They have until May 25th before coding officialy begins. Now is the good time to help them feel more comfortable by sharing all these little bits of knowledge on how Debian works.