Fedora Newsletter for April 2026

[Arran Griffith]

We are ready for Spring over here in the Fedora community. We are very excited to share this month’s newsletter with you because we’ve been busy and there’s lots to talk about! Read on to find out more. News Announcing Fedora 7.0.0 We Did It! Fedora 7.0.0 is officially here. Late last year, the Fedora Committers and Technical Team launched the Dependency Upgrade Project aimed at upgrading the underlying dependency libraries within Fedora. This project laid the groundwork for what would inevitably be the next major release of the Fedora core software. And now, after rounds of community beta and RC testing, we are thrilled to announce that fcrepo-7.0.0 is available in production! This is the first major release since Fedora 6.x in 2021, and it marks a significant milestone for the platform and the community that sustains it. Fedora 7.0.0 delivers a fully modernized, secure and stable foundation: over 40 dependency libraries updated (including Java 11 to Java 21), automated test coverage now exceeding 80%, measurable performance improvements, and a codebase built to support Fedora's mission for years to come. And the best news: if you are already on Fedora 6.x, there is no migration required. Download, deploy, restart. That's it. For institutions still working through a migration from older versions, all existing community tooling and documentation continues to work and will take you directly to 7.0.0. Learn more about what's in Fedora 7.x.  Get Fedora 7.0.0  GitHub: https://github.com/fcrepo/fcrepo/releases/tag/fcrepo-7.0.0 Maven: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/fcrepo/ Docker: https://hub.docker.com/r/fcrepo/fcrepo/tags  This release would not have been possible without the sustained dedication of our Committer team and other contributors. Please join us in thanking:  Fedora Committer Team:  Ben Pennell - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Dan Field - Fedora Developer Demina Katz - Villanova University Jared Whiklo - University of Manitoba Other Contributors:  Alex Weid Basil Marti - Docuteam James Alexander - The Open University, UK Thomas Bernhart - Docuteam  And a sincere thank you to everyone in the Fedora community who participated in beta and RC testing, provided feedback, and engaged in discussions along the way. Your contributions are woven into every line of this release. Thank you from the entire Program Team & Community.  Fedora & Black Lunch Table Our work on the Black Lunch Table (BLT) pilot project continues to progress. In our latest blog post, we share more details about Black Lunch Table’s mission and vision for this project, along with details on how the implementation work is going to date. This pilot project is a creative and innovative new concept for the Fedora Program Team and we look forward to sharing more details in the coming weeks as we near the completion of our contract. Read the Fedora/BLT blog post  Fedora for Digital Preservation In early April, NDSA released V2.1 of the Levels of Digital Preservation. In response, we published a new resource that maps Fedora's capabilities directly to all four levels across all five functional areas: Storage, Integrity, Control, Metadata and Content. This resource allows you to see exactly how Fedora can support digital preservation best practices at every stage of maturity. Whether you're making the case internally for Fedora, evaluating your current infrastructure, or just getting started, this can help. Check out how Fedora supports the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation.   Fedora Member Spotlight Fedora Implementation at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München This month we shared the latest installment in the Fedora Implementations blog series. We are thankful to Jaime Penagos and Alexander Berg-Weiß from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) for sitting down with us to discuss their Fedora implementation and walk through the decision-making that led to their early adoption of Fedora 6.x. Jaime explains that... "Fedora does its work. It can be adapted into different types of workflows. It is reliable. Complex metadata models can be modeled and adapted to Fedora, and the files will comply with the current and future requirements of digital preservation." Read the Fedora/LMU blog post Fedora in the Community Fedora Camp is Back! Fedora Camp is back this September. Join us September 2-4 in Vienna for 3 days of in-person collaboration, learning and networking with Fedora community members from around the world! More details coming soon.  Get Involved  Fedora is designed, built, used and supported by the community. Join the conversation on our Fedora Slack channel or sign up for our Fedora community mailing list to stay in the loop.

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