Welcome to the December issue of the Fedora Newsletter.  In addition to the usual update on the latest developments within our community, we’ve included links to some further reading for your interest.

News

Fedora 6 Alpha Release and the Road to Beta

This month the Fedora 6 Alpha was released and made available to the community for download and testing. This marks a significant milestone for the community and brings us much closer to a production release aimed at early 2021. Read about it here.

The team worked very hard to deliver the following features in the Alpha Release:

1. Alpha Migration Tooling for Fedora 3, 4 & 5 to Fedora 6
2. Native Amazon S3 Support for Oxford Common File Layout persistence
3. Built-in search service
4. Support for collecting performance metrics
5. Docker deployment option

With Alpha finished, the team is now  focused on addressing criteria required for Beta Release. The expectation for the Beta Release is that the core software and migration tooling be feature-complete. The November/December sprint aimed to work through the 6.0 ticket backlog. While a Beta release before the end of the year is looking unlikely, we will be releasing a second alpha which will include the work completed during the sprint.

Proposed criteria for Beta release:

1. Core software: feature complete
2. Migration tooling: feature complete
3. Documented performance criteria for the 6.0 release
4. Updated documentation (same as Alpha, but updated for Beta)

The Beta-testing phase will not only be directed towards testing Fedora’s functionality, but also include verification of the appropriate Islandora and Samvera integrations. Additionally, during the Beta-testing phase we will explore and document the limits and characteristics of Fedora under a range of performance and scale scenarios.

Please mark your calendars for participation in a Beta-testing period in early 2021!

IMLS Grant Update: Fedora Migration Paths and Tools

This grant (lg-246264-ols-20) is focused on developing, piloting, and documenting migration tools and paths for upgrading Fedora 3 repositories to Fedora 6. Fedora staff and the grant partners have been working hard on this project and are pleased to share the following updates:

1. The University of Virginia pilot team has been testing migration-utils and documenting issues. This testing has allowed us to improve the utility while at the same time documenting potential issues future migration teams may run into and how to overcome them.
2. The LYRASIS team is working on a validation tool to compare Fedora 3 to 6 output. This tool will be used to validate that the University of Virginia migration has been completed successfully and all data has been migrated without loss.
3. The Whitman College team is wrapping up their metadata remediation and mapping efforts. We are documenting these efforts, including the process, tools, and decision making, to share with the community as part of the forthcoming toolkit.

Stay tuned for future updates!

Communications 

This month we also re-launched our demo videos. With a goal of showcasing a new video once a month, we began by sharing our Fedora 6 Highlight Reel which features the Top 4 Features in Fedora 6 we thought you would be most excited about. Up next was our Performance Tracking with Grafana where Andrew Woods walked us through the new and improved performance tracking metrics available within Fedora 6.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel here to follow along and see what other exciting things we have to share.

Activities in Related Communities

Islandora

• First quarterly ISLE sprint concluded and they delivered docker deployment for Islandora 8 so that repositories can smoothly move from development to testing to production. More info available here.
• Welcomed new committers, Bethany Seeger, Dan Aiken & Gavin Morris.

Samvera

• Samvera Developer Congress successfully concluded
• Wrap up notes and Retro available here.
• Avalon Media System Team announced the release of Avalon 7.2
• Release includes support for supplemental files, an improved authentication flow for restricted content and the ability to merge items
• Notes on the release can be found here.

Oxford Common File Layout

• Community meeting took place on Nov 11, 2020
• Next community meeting:
• Wednesday, December 9, 2020 at 6:00:00 pm  EST  UTC-5 hours 
• Thursday, December 10, 2020 at 10:00:00 am AEDT UTC+11 hours

Coming Up Next…

Stay tuned this month for the following:

• Fun Festive Fedora Frenzy - community engagement activity for everyone complete with prizes.
• Monthly IMLS Grant Update Blog Post - follow along with David Wilcox as he brings you up to speed on the team’s progress.
• Monthly Demo Video - what feature will we showcase next? What features would you like to see? Email me at arran.griffith@gmail.com with your ideas for our next demo video.

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 theregistry? Help us maintain reliable information on the community of Fedora users around the world byregistering your repositorytoday. 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 ofthese bugs, please add a comment to a ticket and we can work together to move your interest forward.