Shibboleth IdP 4.1

[Cantor, Scott]

On 3/30/21, 5:27 AM, "users on behalf of Max Spicer via users" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of users at shibboleth.net> wrote:

>    I hadn't appreciated that this was the case. Looking at the release notes and documentation for 4.1, it
> appears that the work and testing required for an upgrade from 4.0 to 4.1 will be at least equivalent, and
> probably more, than that from 3.4 to 4.0.

That has not been the case in my experience. I had to port an extension in Java to upgrade to 4.0, while there are no API changes of that sort in 4.1. I slapped 4.1 on top of 4.0 and nothing broke, several times over the life of the development cycle.

Among other things, there were major LDAP changes in 4.0, there are effectively none in 4.1. Most of the "problems" I know of with 4.0 have been LDAP configuration issues or people running systems they never bothered to modernize from V2, so they're jumping in effect 2 majors at once.

>  I had assumed that the 4.0 and 4.1 releases would carry on in parallel before 4.0 was declared end of life.

That has never been true in the history of the project to my knowledge, nor is it what we have documented as our versioning policy. We *may* designate older releases as supported but outside of majors, we (virtually if not actually) never have.

As Rod said, if something comes up, it's going to get patched very quickly. I don't even know that there will be significant changes coming later with V5. There's very little benefit to removing all of the configuration support that's been supplanted.

-- Scott