Version 3.0 (Nov 2012)

Why 3.0? What happened to 2.0?

In 2011, after much discussion, the DSpace Committers in conjunction with members of the DSpace Community Advistory Team (DCAT) decided to forgo releasing a "DSpace 2.0".

The reasons for this decision were numerous and include:

• The discussions around DSpace "2.0" have gone through many different revisions over the past 8 years:
  • Discussion of "2.0" first began in 2004, with Robert Tansley's DSpace 2.0 Original Proposal
  • A reworking of the "2.0" concept happened in 2006, during a DSpace Architectural Review.
  • A further reworking of the "2.0" concept occurred in 2008-2009 when a prototype version of DSpace 2.0 was built and demoed at Open Repositories 2009.
• As detailed in the 2.0 history above, much of the planning around a "2.0" is now many years old. Although many great ideas/concepts have come out of that work, much of it does need to be reanalyzed for the modern repository environment.
• "2.0" has always been talked about as a "revolutionary" change to the DSpace software platform. In reality, we've found that many of the platform improvements attributed to "2.0" have been incremental in nature. In fact, several 2.0 code/concepts (from the 2009 DSpace 2.0 Prototype) have been included in almost every recent major release.
• Because the "2.0" release has been perceived as being "revolutionary" in nature, it would be difficult to ever fully meet the expectations/assumptions that have built up around this release.
• We all feel that the DSpace Community's immediate needs are better met by incremental changes (over several releases) than by revolutionary changes (over a single release). We feel that incremental changes provide an easier upgrade path between current and future releases of DSpace.

Many of the ideas/concepts of "DSpace 2.0" may still be coming to the DSpace platform. But, they will continue to be added incrementally over several releases. The ideas behind "2.0" still live on, even while the release numbering has changed.

New features in DSpace 3.0

The following is a list of the new features included for release 3.0 (not an exhaustive list):

• Completely rewritten OAI-PMH interface.  See: OAI 2.0 Server
• Item Level Versioning
• Enhancements to Discovery (including hit highlighting & search snippets)
• Discovery for JSPUI
• Advanced Embargo Support
• Batch import for Bibliographic formats (Endnote, BibTex, RIS, TSV, CSV)
• Google Analytics support for JSPUI
• Controlled Vocabulary support for XMLUI
• Type based Submissions. See Submission User Interface
• Better encryption for locally stored passwords. See Authentication by Password
• Mobile theme (beta): (, docs)

A full list of all changes / bug fixes in 3.0 is available in the History section or in the list of "Accepted Changes" below.

Accepted Changes

3.0 Decisions To Be Documented

• Where should translations of individual modules like Discovery go? Including them in the main messages.xml currently works. This should be answered before freeze time, it already poses another barrier for commiting of translations, see DS-1049, DS-1054. This is a subproblem of i18n Improvements Proposal, but let us not divert this discussion too much to broad topics. ~~helix84
  
  • ANSWER: In mtg on July 25, we decided the best we likely can do for 3.0 is to suggest that translations of individual modules should just be added to the central messages.xml/messages.properties files. For the full discussion see: http://irclogs.duraspace.org/index.php?date=2012-07-25 (starts: [20:57])
• Does 3.0 Work with Java 7?
  
  • ANSWER: Yes, it seems to work with both Oracle JDK 7 and OpenJDK 7. We should test & document it works for both. For full discussion see: http://irclogs.duraspace.org/index.php?date=2012-07-25 (starts: [20:13])
  • Actually, I read the log again and nobody said they're running specifically OpenJDK version 7, but I agree we should support it (I will run it when I upgrade my systems). ~~helix84
    
    • UPDATE: demo.dspace.org is running OpenJDK 7
  • We recently added a comment on ticket DS-1081 reporting the problems we faced with Oracle JDK 7 (and OpenJDK 7) and the XmlWorkflow. It'd be great if someone could test it and confirm it.
• Do we need to bump up required/recommended versions of any dependencies? (e.g. Maven, Postgres?)

Release Schedule Details

Release Coordination

Instead of a single "Release Coordinator", the DSpace 3.0 release will be managed by a "Release Team".

• Release Team Leader: Sands Fish (MIT)
• Release Team Members: Sands Fish (MIT), Hardy Pottinger (U of Missouri), Robin Taylor (EDINA, U of Edinburgh), Ivan Masár

Timeline and Processing

Release Timeline:

• August 24, 2012 : Feature/Code Submission Deadline - New features must be submitted as a GitHub Pull Request by this date. Any new features submitted after this date will not be considered for 3.0.
• August 31, 2012 : Final Documentation Due Date - Initial documentation for all new features is due.
• September 14, 2012 : Feature Freeze - This is an internal deadline for the Committers. This is the date by which the Release Team and Committers will have reviewed via Pull Request, and accepted or rejected all contributions made for the 3.0 release. Rejected code has to wait for the next version of DSpace (or is suggested to be released separate from the current release as a "third party add-on", if applicable).
• October 8, 2012 : Release Candidate 1 is released
• October 10-19, 2012 : Test-a-thon
• October 22-31, 2012 : Bug fixing period
• November 1, 2012 : Release Candidate 2 is released
• November 5-14, 2012 : Final Testing / Bug Fixing
• November 15/16, 2012 : 3.0 Final Release

Release Process needs to proceed according to the following Maven release process: Release Procedure