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Introduction

Release Date: August 23, 2010

We are proud to announce the release of Fedora 3.4. Although a minor release, this version includes a number of exciting new features and bug fixes that make Fedora an ever more compelling repository platform.

You are encouraged to download this new release and give it a spin. Please let us have your comments and feedback via the mailing lists, and of course please let us know of any problems you discover.

Some of the important new features are:

DC, RELS-EXT, RELS-INT as Managed Content: The Dublin Core and Relationships datastreams can now be stored as Managed Content, improving performance particularly when these datastreams are large. A migration tool is included to migrate existing inline XML datastreams to managed content datastreams
REST API relationships methods: New methods in the REST API for adding and manipulating relationships in RELS-EXT and RELS-INT
Enhanced Content Models: Including the ability to validate objects against their content models, and support for optional datastreams
Optimistic Locking: The REST API now provides support for optimistic locking to ensure no one else has made a change to an object since you started editing it
FeSL Authentication: FeSL Authentication can now be used independently of FeSL's experimental authorization mechanism, and is now the default authentication mechanism (although the old mechanism can be specified during installation). FeSL Authorization is still disabled by default.
FeSL policies as Fedora Objects: XACML policies are now managed in FeSL directly through the Fedora API by manipulating Fedora objects containing a FESLPOLICY datastream
Logging reconfiguration without restart: Using the new SLF4J and Logback logging framework, logging configuration changes now become effective without having to restart the server
Akubra low-level storage: Akubra is now considered production-ready and is the default low-level storage module
REST API improvements and bug fixes: further stabilizing the REST API
Deprecation of "LITE" APIs: As of this release, the API-A-LITE and API-M-LITE APIs are deprecated, and will be removed in a future release. You are encouraged to migrate any code using these APIs to use the new REST API.

As of version 3.4, we recommend the MediaShelf Java Client Library.. The existing client libraries supplied with the server distribution are now considered deprecated, and will no longer be maintained.

As of version 3.4, Java 5 (JDK 1.5) is no longer supported. Java 6 (JDK 1.6) or later is required both to build and run Fedora.
Java package names have undergone a thorough revision for this release. If you have your own code built against Fedora libraries and you update these to use the libraries from this version you will need to update your code to use the new package names.
If you have built your own storage plugins you will need to modify these to work with the new package names and some minor changes to the ILowLevelStorage interface

As of version 3.4, Akubra is the default low-level storage module, replacing the legacy file storage module
Akubra is not backwards-compatible with object and datastream file storage from pre 3.4 repositories (these will have been using the legacy file storage module)
If you are upgrading an existing pre-3.4 repository please ensure you select the legacy-fs option for Low Level Storage when installing (or use llstore.type=legacy-fs in your install.properties file)

Version 3.4 includes Enhanced Content Models (ECM)
This is the first version of Fedora with ECM, and we welcome feedback from the community on these new features
Please note that some features in ECM are liable to change based on this feedback

In version 3.4 many bug-fixes and improvements have been made to the REST API
Previously the output of some REST API methods was incorrect and invalid against the schemas
If your client applications use the REST API, you may need to update your handling of some REST API responses, particularly if you use namespace-aware parsing (default namespaces have been added to some method responses which were previously missing these)

For a detailed list of features and bugfixes comprising this release see the tables below.

Features and Improvements

Bug Fixes

Previous Release Notes

All release notes for Fedora 3.4.x can be found here.