News / 21 January 2014

iRODS 4.0.0 Beta 1 is released


RENCI is pleased to announce the first beta of the fourth major open source release of iRODS, managed and overseen by the iRODS Consortium.

iRODS 4.0.0 will mark a reunification and merger of the community codebase of iRODS and the Enterprise codebase of E-iRODS which diverged at iRODS 3.0 (released September 30, 2011).

All the code and current working issues are hosted at GitHub: https://github.com/irods/irods

This release is another significant step towards a full plugin architecture while remaining API compatible with existing iRODS 3.x releases.  We are committed to keeping Federation with iRODS 3.x grids a first class use case.

4.0.0b1 includes all community bugfixes through iRODS 3.3 as well as the newest rule engine. This beta represents a full merger of the code through community iRODS r5575 (October 20, 2013).

The release notes include:

Development of this release has focused on the following features and efforts:

- Introduced pluggable interface for databases
    - PostgreSQL
 - Full python-based testing framework
 - Certified against full Jargon test suite
 - Continuous integration testing via hudson
 - Continuous static analysis via cppcheck
 - Optimized builds with "-O3" and "-Werror"
 - Increased code coverage from \~55% to over 56%
 - Topology testing
 - Continuously built and tested across 3 major linux distributions
 - Packaged for 3 major linux distributions
 - Support for package upgrade via package manager

This release includes packages that have been tested on CentOS 5 and 6, SuSE 11 and 12, and Ubuntu 10 and 12.

iRODS Manual (4.0.0b1), Jan 2014 (PDF, 396KB)

Please find the latest files available at ftp://ftp.renci.org/pub/irods/releases/4.0.0b1/.

At this time, upgrading from either community 3.x or E-iRODS 3.0.1 will require a manual set of steps by the grid/system administrator. Refining this process is a central part of getting to our final release of 4.0.0 in March. If you have a production system and would like to be a part of the testing before 4.0.0 is released, please contact us through the email below.

Please send feedback to info@irods.org.


Terrell Russell