This release is a major release (i.e. 4.7.0 instead of 4.6.1) because of the upgrade in an underlying application, Modeshape 5. This requires a backend data upgrade. See the "ModeShape 5 Upgrade" section below for details.

The deprecated filesystem federation connector has been moved from the core codebase into a separate module.
The transform feature has been replaced by the more robust tooling found in the external LDPath service.

This release is a major release (i.e. 4.6.0 instead of 4.5.2) because there are several REST API updates that are not backwards compatible with 4.5.x. The following, deprecated, REST endpoints have been removed:

• /fcr:nodetypes
• /fcr:export
• /fcr:import

Additionally, the user-provided repository.json configuration file must be set as a system property. Unlike in previous releases, there is no default value. See Application Configuration for more details.

The other non-backwards compatible change is the update to the messaging format, detailed in the section below.

This release is a major release (i.e. 4.5.0 instead of 4.4.1) because there are a several REST API updates that are not backwards compatible with 4.4.0. The theme of these updates is the removal of JCR-related properties that have heretofore been leaked from the Fedora API in the RDF returned to users. Fedora 4 is in no way dependent on JCR, and any mention of JCR found in RESTful responses will be removed. No client code should require updating for this release unless it contains dependencies on JCR-namespaced properties.

See tickets in "Application Programming Interface" below for more details.

This release is a major release (i.e. 4.4.0 instead of 4.3.1) because there are a two updates that are not strictly speaking backwards compatible with 4.3.0:

• HTTP GET requests on descriptions of NonRDF resources (i.e. binaries) now return RDF triples that all have the NonRDF resource as the subject, whereas previously the returned RDF contained a mix of subjects in the response: some subjects were the NonRDF resource, some subjects were the NonRDF description resource
• When requesting the fixity service [5] be performed on a binary resource, the "status" of the fixity result has been changed in this release from: "fedora:status" to "premis:hasEventOutcome"

Although not a backwards incompatible update in the 4.4.0 release, it should be noted that the Import and Export services [6] have been deprecated due to their reliance on a JCR serialization versus an RDF-centric approach. These services will be supplanted by externalized machinery that transacts in RDF.

This release is 4.3.0 instead of 4.2.1 because there are two non-backwards compatible changes:

• Several properties (mimetype, filename, digest, and cnd update) no longer use the fedora namespace.
• The fcrepo-kernel and fcrepo-kernel-impl packages have been renamed to fcrepo-kernel-api and fcrepo-kernel-modeshape, respectively.

An update utility [3] has been included with the release - see the README [4] for how to run the utility to migrate the properties to their new namespaces and update the package names.

The reason this release is 4.2.0 instead of 4.1.2 is because the required version of Java was upgraded to Java8 per the project policy [3].