Fedora 4.0

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
2 min read

Fedora4 Breakout

Facilitator: Justin Coyne (Digital Curation Experts)
Notetaker: Adam Wead (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum)

Attendees: (Attendance was not taken. This is from memory, so if I missed someone please add them in.)

  • Jon Dunn (Indiana University)
  • Karen Cariani (WGBH)
  • Mike Giarlo (Penn State)
  • Esme Cowles (UCSD)
  • Mark Bussey (Digital Curation Experts)
  • Corey Harper (NYU)
  • Tom Johnson (University of Oregon)
  • Chris Beer (Stanford)
  • David Chandek-Stark (Duke)
  • Jim Coble (Duke)
  • Jimmy Tang (Trinity College Dublin)
  • Glen Horton (University of Cincinnati)
  • Carolyn Cole (Penn State)
  • Steven Ng (Chinese Historical Society of Southern California)
  • + many others!

Proposed Strategy

Late spring: get the ActiveFedora gem (AF) working with Fedora4. There will be a hard cut-over.  AF version 8 will move from Fedora3 to Fedora4.
There are no plans to make a single version of AF work with both Fedora3 and Fedora4 simultaneously.

ActiveFedora 7.0 and older = Fedora3 (F3)
ActiveFedora 8.0 and newer = Fedora4 (F4)

As of this writing, January 26, 2014, ActiveFedora is at version 6.7.6 with version 7.0 already in release candidate status.

Rubydora will go away with AF 8.0. LDP client for Ruby will replace the functionality of Rubydora.

LDP is currently under development, but opportunities exist to pull in Ruby/RDF community.  LDP defines all the CRUD operations needed for F4 integration

We need devs from institutions to donate cycles to get the work done required to make AF compatible with Fedora4.

Questions and Issues

Timelines? Stanford wants to get Spotlight done first, but dev can start now.

How do we know when we're done? If it works in Sufia, it's working.

How will F4's new features influence Hydra's development, such as permissions on datastreams?

Start with feature parity. Once you have that, you can use Hydra with F4 and begin to incorporate Fedora4's newer features into the Hydra stack.

What would the first real Hydra/F4 success look like? (Mark Bussey to Jon Dunn)
Good start with replicating Sufia. Project by project replication is not as useful as identifying overall features.

Getting institutions to shift to F4 will be an issue (Justin Coyne)

Our products are young enough and not as populated. We want them on F4 this year. (Michael Giarlo)

Where should I start? (Cory Harper)
Start with Fedora3 because F4 isn't ready now with Hydra.

Need for institutional resources to contribute to development
We could contribute resources (Karen Cariani)

Improvements to fixity checking in F4?
Self-healing storage for corrupt files stored in multiple locations.

Storage and HSM

Getting F4 to work with asynchronous storage is a shared need, but not a blocker to getting started with development of ActiveFedora with Fedora4.

Migration Path

Don't use disseminators

ActiveFedora should not be responsible for migrating content from Fedora3 to Fedora4.

Ben Armintor currently maintains F3 and does some work on F4. Corey Harper may have some leads on someone in the NYC area that might have resources to contribute.

Action Items

  1. List of things that will break (Justin Coyne and Chris Beer)
  2. Finding resources from your institution to contribute to effort (everyone!)
  3. Plan an upgrade path session for LibDevConX (Tom Johnson will head this up)