Release date: 29 April, 2016
We are proud to announce the release of Fedora 4.5.1.
THIS DOCUMENT IS CURRENTLY BEING DRAFTED - 2016-04-29
Resources
Team
Release Managers
Developers
A. Soroka
- Andrew Woods
- Bethany Seeger
- Esmé Cowles
- Jared Whiklo
- Michael Durbin
- Nick Ruest
- Osman Din
- Scott Prater
- Yinlin Chen
Issue Reporters
- A. Soroka
- Unknown User (acoburn)
- Andrew Woods
- Unknown User (daniel-dgi)
- David Chandek-Stark
- Elliot Metsger
- Esmé Cowles
- Harsha Ummerpillai
- Hélder Silva
- Jared Whiklo
- Jason Sherman
- Jim Coble
- Justin Coyne
- Nick Ruest
- Osman Din
- Peter Eichman
- Scott Prater
- Steve DiDomenico
- Stuart Chalk
- Trey Pendragon
- Yinlin Chen
Summary
The Fedora 4.5.1 release furthers several major objectives:
- Tighten the definition of the RESTful application programming interface (API)
- Improving the Versioning capability
- Further align this API to community standards, including the Linked Data Platform [3] (LDP) and Web Access Control [4] (WebAC)
- Enhance preservation capabilities and related documentation
- Improve tooling for external services in the ecosystem around the repository
- Fix bugs
Application Programming Interface
One of the technical priorities [5] of Fedora is to define a well-specified application programming interface (API) against which client applications can be written and future server-side implementations can be created. This Fedora API should be clear and detailed enough such that a corresponding technology compatibility kit [6] (TCK) would be able to indicate if any Fedora implementation fulfills or diverges from the specification. With this in mind, several issues were addressed in this release that clean up Fedora's RESTful interaction.
Deprecations: The following endpoints have been marked for future deprecation:
- /fcr:import
- /fcr:export
- /fcr:nodetypes
Versioning
This release includes several bug fixes related to versioning:
- Resolves error encountered when GETting a version of a container that itself has versioned child resources
- Resolves error encountered when GETting a version of a container that had a deleted child resource
- Resolves inability to see description of binary resource versions
Web Access Control
This release furthers the Web Access Control [9] authorization module with several fixes, including:
Version creation in the context of WebAC now works
- WebAC "accessControl" Link header from effective ancestor is provided
Additional documentation of Fedora's implementation of Web Access Controls is available on the wiki [13].
Performance
One of Fedora's perennial goals is "improved performance". With this as a focus, a Performance and Scalability working group [] has progressed in the creation of repeatable, scripted tests that exercise and meter basic read/write operations. The objective of these tests is to reveal application bottlenecks and to track changes in performance as the reference Fedora implementation evolves.
Preservation
From a preservation perspective, this release includes support for alternative backend object stores to the default LevelDB. New configurations now exist for MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Housekeeping and Bugfixes
Numerous refactorings, bugfixes, and clean-up tasks were addressed in this release:
References
[1] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Downloads [2] http://docs.fcrepo.org/ [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/ [4] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl [5] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/2015+-+2016+Technical+Priorities [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_Compatibility_Kit [7] https://github.com/fcrepo4-exts/migration-utils [8] https://github.com/dain/leveldb [9] http://www.w3.org/wiki/WebAccessControl [10] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA45/Principal+Providers#PrincipalProviders-DelegateHeaderPrincipalProvider [11] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA45/Default+Filesystem-based+Policy [12] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA45/How+to+Use+WebAC+agentClass+Groups [13] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FEDORA45/WebAC+Authorization+Delegate
