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This monthly newsletter summarizes the most significant activities within the Fedora community over the last month.
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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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Standards
4.6.2 and 4.7.2 Releases
Earlier this month, two common Java library vulnerabilities surfaced:
Although related libraries have historically been included in Fedora's deployable artifacts, investigation confirmed that Fedora is not subject to the vulnerability; in fact, Fedora is not actually making use of the affected libraries. Because of this, and to eliminate any doubt of a potential vulnerability, the libraries have been removed from the codebase and a patch release has been issued to the 4.7 line and backported to the 4.6 line.
Release notes for Fedora
4.6.2 and
4.7.2
are available on the wiki.
The Fedora community is working to establish a clearly defined specification for the core Fedora services. This specification details the exact services and interactions required for a server implementation to be verified as "doing Fedora".
Community members raised issues around implementing Batch Atomic Operations in a distributed architecture, leading to a decision to separate this element into its own
specification document. We are also seeking further input on supporting different kinds of
external content.
The
draft specification has been published and is looking for community comments. Following this round of input, we plan on an initial release of the specification in the spring of 2017.
Fedora API Adopters Guide
As the formalization of the
Fedora API Specification matures, it will be increasingly important for existing applications and frameworks over Fedora to adjust client/server interactions to the specification. The services defined in the Fedora API Specification are the same ones that are currently provided by Fedora 4, but the interaction models in some cases are changing to be more in line with broader standards. The effort of this group is to facilitate the adjustment of client-side tooling by detailing the "deltas" between the current Fedora 4 implementation and the emerging specification.
Please stay tuned for updates and opportunities for engagement.
Community-driven Activity
Fedora Contributor Profiles
The Fedora project relies on many individuals and institutions to ensure the project's success. We are grateful for their commitment and will showcase their contributions in a series of community profiles aimed at recognizing our contributors' achievements, and introducing them to the rest of the community. The first article in the Fedora Repository Contributor Profile series features Danny Bernstein, who has a long history with DuraSpace technologies and is a new contributor to the Fedora repository team. His focus is on core Fedora performance issues particularly as they relate to development of the new Hyku repository. The
full article
can be found on the DuraSpace website.
Import/Export Tooling
One of the design goals of Fedora is to simplify the process of both getting your resources into and out of Fedora in a standardized way. This enables the reuse of Fedora resources in other contexts, such as exporting to a separate preservation system, as well as provides a pathway for migrating across Fedora installations. This design goal is being met by an
external import/export tool that supports transacting in RDF and (optionally) BagIt bags.
We will be organizing another code sprint to address
phase 3 requirements in the near future. If you would like to participate as developer, tester, or to write documentation, please contact
Andrew Woods.
Performance and Scale
The Performance and Scale group
met on March 20
and discussed progress on the
"many members" performance issue
, which affects retrieval times for resources with a large number of members. Danny Bernstein pursued a number of optimization strategies and found that a combination of parallel processing streams and increasing the size of the ModeShape cache produced significant performance gains of 5-8x.
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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.
Upcoming Events
Hydra Camp
The next
Hydra Camp will take place April 17-20 at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. Led by
Data Curation Experts, Hydra Camp is open to all developers interested in building skills working with the Hydra technology framework. Please
register in advance to attend.
Museums and the Web
IFLA International News Media Conference
From printed newspapers to born-digital news, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions have a central role in ensuring future access to news content. The IFLA News Media Conference, which takes place April 27-28 in Reykjavík, Iceland, will examine issues and challenges in collecting and preserving the news and making it available to users. The conference will include a
Fedora workshop delivered by David Wilcox.
Advanced Hydra Camp
Data Curation Experts is offering an Avanced Hydra Camp on May 8-10 in Minneapolis, MN. This camp is for developers with a year or more hands-on Hydra development experience who have already attended Hydra Camp or have equivalent knowledge. Please
register in advance to attend.
Islandora Conference
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