A note of praise for the developers

[Cantor, Scott]

On 6/25/20, 10:45 AM, "users on behalf of Wessel, Keith" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of kwessel at illinois.edu> wrote:

> After my upgrade experience to IdP v4, I felt the need to send a note out to the community to publicly praise the
> developers. This upgrade from IdP v3 to v4 was truly the easiest major software upgrade I've ever seen for any
> commercial or opensource software!

We appreciate the note, but It's probably a little bit misleading to treat this is a major upgrade. That's more of a consequence of the removal of features and APIs and the Java change than a real reflection of the degree of difference. I would expect that to be true from now on until/unless a real redesign happens, which nobody is seeking. [1]

That's not to say it didn't take work (the Registry feature was a big deal to retrofit and came out very well). The pattern we plan to follow is to continue to ship at least one minor branch with deprecation warnings before a major upgrade that removes them and that seems to have worked well for this release.

But there are specific things that we have to do at times that seem automatic, but were in fact the result of a lot of planning and work. I try and highlight those on the development blog.

> My only suggestion is to draw out the need for Java 11 on the upgrade page.

I added it to the note box.

-- Scott

[1] The exception is the OIDC changes coming with V5, we have to rename the classes and we only have once chance to change the configuration, so if nothing else that will be annoyingly disruptive.