MidPoint 4.0.1 was released. 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. See release notes for the details.
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. 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.