This page of FAQs is offered for information only. We shall try to keep it accurate and up to date but offer no warranty that it is fully correct at any given time.
General
Where can I find out more about Fedora 4?
The Fedora 4 wiki pages can be found here: Fedora Repository Home
DuraSpace also ran a webinar series on Fedora 4 beta pilots; the series is archived at http://duraspace.org/hot-topics
Yes! The Samvera Community was, and remains, one of the driving forces behind the development of a Fedora version 4. From the beginning of that effort Samvera developers have been checking that the new code will serve Samvera's needs and we have had a test installation running against it.
Fedora v4 is significantly different from v3 and the Fedora APIs have changed significantly. New versions of the Samvera gems that interact with Fedora are being developed alongside the development of the Fedora 4 code.
The Fedora team hopes to have a version 4.0 available by the end of the calendar year 2014 (a beta version is available as of June 2014). This version of Fedora is intended to support only new installations - there will be no provision for migrating from a Fedora 3.x repository. We anticipate a first, stable version of a 4.0 compatible Samvera gem-set shortly after the Fedora release. Fedora 4.1, supporting migration from 3.x, will be released sometime in 2015 and, again, a 4.1 compatible Samvera gem-set will be released shortly after that event.
Samvera is in use in a wide variety of institutions and organizations. It is unrealistic to expect that they will all switch to a Fedora 4 based system quickly. Indeed, some of the Samvera installations are preservation repositories which are likely to wait some time to be sure of Fedora 4's stability before committing their content to a new system. Whilst there are Samvera sites using Fedora 3.x compatible gems there is likely to be some level of support for them within the Samvera Community; that said, it is inevitable that over time Samvera developers will concentrate more and more on Fedora 4.x based systems.
For the most part the changes will be painless. There are no changes to OM or Solrizer. We've been very conscious of keeping the old API in place in ActiveFedora and adding deprecations. The primary place you will see issues is in the API for permissions within Samvera-access-controls. These changes were required to move to the RDF based web ACL "standard". Furthermore, the changes better align with the Rails and ActiveRecord API. The most difficult part will be moving the data out of Fedora 3 and into Fedora 4.