[midPoint] Blog: MidPoint 4.0.1 – Gutenberg Update 1

[Radovan Semancik]

Dear midPoint community,

MidPoint 4.0.1 was released a couple of days ago. It is a first update 
in a long-term support (LTS) release family code-named Gutenberg. There 
are many bugfixes and a handful of minor improvements. MidPoint 4.0.1 is 
a start of a long journey.

Gutenberg is a first LTS release. Primary goal of LTS releases is to 
bring stability and maintain the quality. Therefore it is quite expected 
that there will be regular updates to the 4.0.x family. MidPoint 4.0.1 
is first of several updates, but it is certainly not the last one. The 
plan is to have a regular updates to the 4.0.x LTS family. As Gutenberg 
is the first LTS release it is perhaps still too early to say how 
frequent those updates will be. But we can say that maintenance releases 
will be more frequent than they were in the past.

However, there is no free lunch and midPoint development team is not 
infinite. Introduction of LTS program means that the updates to feature 
releases (non-LTS releases) will be less frequent. In fact we do really 
plan any update releases for midPoint 4.1 or 4.2 – unless there is a 
severe security issue or a major functionality problem. Short lifetime 
of the support releases should be sufficient motivation for frequent 
upgrades.

As for the Gutenberg LTS release train, we have worked hard to make sure 
we can support it for many years. Important dependencies were updates to 
recent versions. MidPoint runs on latest Apache Tomcat, we support newer 
database versions, e.g. PostgreSQL 11 which is now a recommended 
database to use with midPoint. Java 11 is strongly preferred platform 
now. Also a lot of smaller dependencies were updated to make sure we can 
support Gutenberg for a long time.

Many of the bugfixes in midPoint 4.0.1 were based on a community 
feedback after the 4.0 release. In fact, midPoint 4.0 provoked quite a 
lot of community feedback. This is also the reason why we have started a 
survey about future of midPoint 4.x:

https://evolveum.limequery.net/685829

Even though this survey is quite long, it is a chance to influence the 
future of midPoint. We are getting a very interesting feedback already. 
Therefore do not hesitate and use your change to tell us what we did 
right and what we did wrong.

-- 
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com