Exciting things are happening on the Fedora development front. We concluded the Fall 2018 Sprint 1 with very strong progress towards our objective of a 5.0 release by the end of the year. The sprint team , which included Fedora veterans Danny Bernstein, Andrew Woods, Ben Pennell, Jared Whiklo, Mohamed Mohideen Abdul Rasheed, and Peter Eichman (with additional supporting contributions from Bethany Seeger , Michael Durbin and Aaron Birkland ) worked particularly well together this time around.
In the course of the two-week sprint we closed 32 issues related to the core codebase, made progress towards completing the 5.0 documentation and added 80 tests to the compatibility test suite bringing the test count to 194. Presently the Fedora Specification is covered by the tests with the exception of coverage of the Messaging section (section 6). While there remain a handful of minor issues/bugs to resolve in the core codebase as well as the Compatibility Test Suite, we are feature complete regarding the specification and the development team is in an excellent position to start the last sprint of the year (Oct 1st). The upcoming sprint will aim to tag a release candidate, a first cut of the Compatibility Test Suite with complete specification coverage, and complete documentation.
It may be worth reiterating that this release will include two major steps towards our effort to move away from Modeshape. As some of you may know, Fedora depends on Modeshape for storing the object metadata. As a community we are moving away from Modeshape for a variety of reasons including inadequate performance for certain use cases, ACL model mismatches, and the lack of an active developer community. In the process of aligning the Fedora 5.0 with the SOLID/WAC specification we were able to remove our dependency on Modeshape's ACL architecture. Similarly we were able to sever our dependence on Modeshape's versioning features with the introduction of Memento versioning.
For the details of the JIRA issues that we closed, see the following list.
