This is the June 2020 edition of the Fedora Newsletter. This newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.

News

Call for Proposals: Online Fedora Users Group Meeting

The first Online Fedora Users Group Meeting will take place the week of August 10 over several days. This meeting is free and open to anyone who would like to attend; it will provide an opportunity for members of the Fedora community to connect, share information, and provide updates on local projects and initiatives. This meeting will be based around American time zones, but anyone is welcome to attend. We are also planning a future meeting that will be based around European timezones.

If you would like to present at the Online Fedora Users Group, please complete the online form.

Fedora Migration Utility and Search Demos

We put together two more Fedora demo videos to showcase recently added features. In the first video, Peter Winckles from the University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrates the updated Fedora 3 to 6 migration utility, which can now produce Fedora 6-compliant OCFL Objects that can be viewed and managed in the Fedora 6 application.

You can find the demo video on YouTube.

In the second video, Danny Bernstein, Fedora Tech Lead, demonstrates the new simple search functionality, which provides a built-in search API for basic queries.

You can find the simple search demo video on YouTube.

These demos follow previous videos where we demonstrated creating Fedora resources via the API and seeing those resources represented on disk as OCFL Objects, how to create and manage archival groups, and how to rebuild your repository from the Fedora 6 OCFL Objects. 

You can find all these videos in this playlist.

We'd like to thank the following people and their institutions for contributing to the latest code sprints:

  • Danny Bernstein, LYRASIS
  • Ben Pennell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  • Jon Roby, University of Manitoba
  • Jared Whiklo, University of Manitoba
  • Peter Winckles, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Andrew Woods, LYRASIS

Fedora 6 Sprint Summary

The last Fedora 6 code sprint was held on June 1-5. The outcomes include:

  1. Implementation of a simple, built-in search endpoint
  2. Support for conducting fixity checks on-demand
  3. Multiple database support for the containment index
  4. Completion of the Web Access Control implementation

Through December of 2020 we will be holding one-week-long Fedora 6 mini-sprints during the first week of each month.

This will allow for consistent progress towards the Fedora 6 release, as well as a clear schedule for you to plan towards. If you miss one month, you can join the next!

The next sprint will take place July 6-10. Please add your name to any of the upcoming sprint dates on the wiki.

Changing ‘master’ branch to ‘main’ in GitHub

The Fedora Committers team voted to approve a change to the Fedora GitHub repository: the ‘master’ branch will be renamed to ‘main’. This small change, which can be implemented easily without negatively impacting development processes, was suggested after members of the Fedora Leadership Group shared some materials on changing nomenclature used in software development. Specifically, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) recommends changing the master-slave metaphor because "Master-slave is an oppressive metaphor that will and should never become fully detached from history" as well as "In addition to being inappropriate and arcane, the master-slave metaphor is both technically and historically inaccurate." Several other open source software communities, including Django, Drupal, and Python, have already made similar changes. GitHub plans to implement this change more broadly in the near future.

Activities in Related Communities

Islandora

Samvera

Oxford Common File Layout

The latest OCFL community meeting took place on June 10. Notes and video from the call are available online. The meeting focused on editorial updates, including discussion around releasing 1.0 and finalizing a validator, and discussion around open tickets and pull requests. The next community call will take place on July 8.

Conferences and events

In an attempt to simplify the task of keeping up with Fedora-related meetings and events, a Fedora calendar is available to the community as HTML  and iCal .

If you have not already joined the fedora-project Slack workspace please start by visiting the self-registration form. Come join the conversation!

Islandora Online

Islandora Online will take place throughout July. It is a series four online events, around five hours each (including breaks), focused on a specific topic of interest to the Islandora community. Each event contains a mix of presentations, panel discussions, and small group discussions, with optional social events during breaks. More details, including registration information, will be available soon.

Online Fedora Users Group Meeting

The first Online Fedora Users Group Meeting will take place the week of August 10 over several days. This meeting is free and open to anyone who would like to attend; it will provide an opportunity for members of the Fedora community to connect, share information, and provide updates on local projects and initiatives. If you would like to present at the Online Fedora Users Group, please complete this form.

Membership

Fedora is funded entirely through the contributions of members that allocate their annual funding to Fedora. This funding supports full-time staff to work on Fedora and provide technical leadership, direct strategic planning, organize community outreach, and coordinate timely software releases. Membership also provides opportunities to participate in project governance and influence the direction of the software. If your institution is not yet a member in support of Fedora, please join us today!

Register Your Repository

Is your repository listed in the registry? Help us maintain reliable information on the community of Fedora users around the world by registering your repository today. You can also request an update to an existing entry by selecting your entry and filling out the online form. 

Get Involved

Fedora is designed, built, used, and supported by the community. An easy and important way that you can contribute to the effort is by helping resolve outstanding bugs. If you have an interest in gaining a better understanding of the Fedora code base, or a specific interest in any of these bugs, please add a comment to a ticket and we can work together to move your interest forward.

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