Fedora 6 support in ActiveFedora

[Chris Colvard]

TL;DR ActiveFedora 15.x will be the end of the line for Fedora 4.  ActiveFedora 16+ will be for Fedora 6.  Avalon 8.0 will use this new version of ActiveFedora with Fedora 6.  YMMV.

With the Valkyrization of Hyrax complete, ActiveFedora will be dropped as a dependency from Hyrax when Wings is removed in a future major release of Hyrax.  There was discussion before if this would lead to the wholesale deprecation of ActiveFedora with most applications using Valkyrie as the main path off of Fedora 4 to either Fedora 6 or a different data store.  Avalon was built before Hyrax and still has a strong dependence on ActiveFedora.  The move to Valkyrie was long for Hyrax and Avalon isn't ready to take that project on yet but we still want to move to Fedora 6.  To this end there was discussion on the Samvera Tech Calls about ActiveFedora 15 (recently released with support for Rails 7.2) as the last in the line of major releases supporting Fedora 4 and future ActiveFedora releases supporting Fedora 6 exclusively. Under this plan, the 15.x-stable branch will contain any updates to sustain ActiveFedora on Fedora 4 and minor/patch releases can be cut from there.  Legacy applications can continue to use ActiveFedora 15.x and contribute to maintaining it or attempt upgrading to Fedora 6 and ActiveFedora 16+.

The Fedora 6 support in ActiveFedora is based upon years of separate efforts building upon each other by Trey Pendragon, Stuart Kenny, and myself.  Sacrifices were made in order to push forward without getting bogged down on 100% backwards compatibility.  Notably, external files and version handling had to change.  Avalon 8.0, soon to be released, will use ActiveFedora with Fedora 6 and has been tested extensively but other applications may encounter bugs due to their idiosyncratic uses of ActiveFedora.  Release notes for ActiveFedora 16 will attempt to highlight the changes in more detail as well as note areas needing more testing.

See the Fedora 6 support pull request and my Samvera Connect 2023 presentation for some more details about this current iteration of working on support for Fedora 6 in ActiveFedora.

Please don't hesitate to attend a Wednesday 12 EST Samvera Tech Call, respond to this email, or reach out in slack with any questions or concerns about this change.

Thanks,

Chris Colvard