2026-01-23 Hyrax Fedora 6 Working Group

 Date

Jan 23, 2026@ 11am Eastern

 Participants

• @Arran Griffith

• @Ben Pennell

• @Bradley Watson

• @Collin Brittle- regrets

• @Dan Field

• @Daniel Pierce

• @Emily Porter- regrets

• @Heather Greer Klein

• @Jon Dunn

• @Juliet Hardesty

• @Nicholas Mark Homenda

• @Scott Prater

• @Randall Floyd

• @Rebekah Kati - regrets

• @Tom Wrobel

indicates note taker

 Discussion topics

Notes 

Hyrax update
-- Randall: not much of an update; working on syncing Hyku/Hyrax versions, getting flexible metadata component working in Hyrax
still to be resolved/verified: performance issues
-- Daniel: working on Fedora 6 adapter for Bulkrax, examining a custom query
Pending a community effort to test
Met with Fedora folks to discuss its integration with Hyrax; current direct calls is problematic, causes some Fedora performance issues; discussed using a caching mechanism/preservation middleware in Hyrax, with periodic asynchronous updates to Fedora: goal is to make it easy to plug in, configure
-- Presentation is at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Mc24Kw8f21sQt9X3Jpk-isWD1PqejE-zpkhi2BZPREQ/edit
-- Tom Wrobel: currently export data from Hyrax, import to OCFL repo, manage it with Fedora; need to move off Fedora 4
Tom has code that exports Hyrax data in JSON, only new content and updates are noted and managed
-- difficulty is turning content into JSON
-- has Fedora 6 client written Ruby; has been very reliable
-- Preservation service is OCFL; Fedora 6 is simply a management wrapper
-- Ben Pennell: Can Hyrax be restored from OCFL/Fedora? Can Fedora be the primary storage for Hyrax?
-- Tom: OCFL offers some features (particularly versioning) not supported in Hyrax
-- Daniel: Valkyrie postgres adapter stores data as JSON
-- Tom: complexity may be in serializing nested relationships
-- Daniel (to Ben): Should be simple to restore from Fedora to Hyrax
-- Tom: there's also workflow admin metadata (users, permissions, etc.) that need to be reset in Hyrax, too
-- Randall (to Ben): want to stress that Hyrax will continue support direct connection to Fedora; middleware would be optional/extra
-- Ben: sounds good, if it's intended to support bidirectional export/import
-- Julie: Want to make clear that Hyrax, Bulkrax work is continuing as planned
-- Randall: Seems like there's not a lot of demand for direct Fedora connection
-- Julie: Rob Kaufman (Hyrax/Hyke tech coordinator) should be added to this group?
-- Heather: Rob only has 20 hours a month, so meetings are carefully scheduled
-- Nicholas: sprinting now on Bulkrax work; we can invite Rob only to certain meetings where it directly affects his work
-- Arran: as we wrap up testing, let's sunset the working group once deliverables are met. Migration is not one of the deliverables, not in scope, though we can offer pointers. But working group could be repurposed, if necessary (less working group, more user group)
-- Julie: you mean interest groups
-- Nicholas: Randall's proposal was well-received in Hyrax interest group; trying to hear from more Hyrax implementers, to get a sense of where people are at, how tech team can help them out
-- Arran: this working group could transition to Hyrax interest group
question: what Hyrax release are we at? https://github.com/samvera/Hyrax/releases
-- Nicholas: we are Hyrax 5.2. Hyrax Chart versioning is not in sync

Valkyrie updates
-- Daniel: There is a minor Valkyrie release, nothing major; dropped Fedora 5 support

Fedora updates
-- Arran: Fedora 7.0.0 alpha 2 ready; few pending PRs, then 7.0.0 beta will be more broadly released later this month; will reach out to this group for testing; Arran working with Fedora team on testing process, gathering feedback
2 weeks beta test, then RC release, then prod release in February
-- Randall: are known implementers called out, like before?
-- Arran: Actively looking for feedback from communities (Samvera, Islandora, Avalon...)
-- Randall: we (Hyrax) need to keep abreast and continue to test and document results for Fedora releases
-- Arran: alpha is at https://github.com/fcrepo/fcrepo/releases

Sirenia updates
-- Randall: need to verify a performance issue that may or may not have been folded into Valkyrie
-- Nicholas: changes merged into Hyrax
-- Randall: real solution for performance issue requires caching; not sure if it's been tested and merged
-- Arran: we talked about this sometime in the past... will investigate
-- Randall: definitely not a Fedora problem

Next meeting
Arran: waiting on Bulkrax to move to phase II of testing; do we need to meet if still waiting next month for Bulkrax work?
Everyone agrees we can check in before next meeting, before committing to meet