Although there are various community-driven developments in the Fedora ecosystem, this document describes the roughly 12-month technical focus of the core repository platform.Fedora 6.0.0
The next major version of Fedora will focus on the following requirements:
- Replace the ModeShape persistence layer with a different technology that implements the Oxford Common File Layout
- Add a synchronous query service
- Improve the fixity service
- Address known performance and scale issues
- Support migrations from earlier versions of Fedora (3.x, 4.x, and 5.x)
Further details can be found on the design page.
Fedora 6 development is expected to take place over the course of monthly code sprints throughout 2020.
Why the Oxford Common File Layout?
The OCFL provides the following benefits:
- Parsability, both by humans and machines, to ensure content can be understood in the absence of original software
- Robustness against errors, corruption, and migration between storage technologies
- Versioning, so repositories can make changes to objects allowing its history to persist
- Storage diversity, to ensure content can be stored on diverse storage infrastructures including cloud object stores
- Completeness, so that a repository can be rebuilt from the files it stores
These benefits supplement the digital preservation features already provided by Fedora, including:
- Fixity: Checksums can be calculated, stored and compared on demand
- Versioning: Objects and files can be versioned and restored on demand
- Import/Export: Objects and files can be exported on demand to facilitate their use in other elements of a digital preservation workflow
- Audit: Preservation metadata can be generated by repository events and indexed in a triplestore for querying
The combined functionality of Fedora with OCFL persistence will better support an overall digital preservation strategy.