The project had a productive holiday period, with a fairly unprecedented three software releases done in one week, IdP V3.4.8, SP V3.2.0, and xmlsectool V3.0.0. We also launched a new web site.

V3.4.8 was of course the final IdPv3 release and the branch is nominally closed. We may backport some fixes if circumstances warrant for those wanting to continue maintaining their own builds, but there will be no official releases of any of the relevant projects and we will be shutting down our Jenkins builds shortly. We bid a not-so-fond adieu to supporting Java 7 (and 8 and 9 and 10). While V3.4.8 is still unsupported, we do recommend it to anybody not planning to upgrade to V4 soon simply to obtain the latest (and last) version of Spring 4 and other minor updates.

Work continued, though intermittently, on IdP V4.1. I think Q1 is still our target. We're definitely in the final phases so not much new work is happening from here out, just cleanup, testing, documentation, etc. The OIDC code has been repackaged into the net.shibboleth namespace but documentation still needs to be written. There are significant, though we hope beneficial, changes from the earlier "non-final" versions. We intend to maintain separation between plugin/extension documentation and the IdP documentation so that they can evolve independently. Not much is done yet, but it will show up in the IDPPLUGINS space.

While the SP release was completed using the existing packaging approach, we have a working prototype of a new build and packaging process using Docker that we hope to migrate to for future releases, but the side effect of that will likely be the elimination of many older and little used platforms. One side effect of this should be a more readily extensible basis for others to build their own packaging on for private use.

On the subject of the SP, we have an initial Zoom call scheduled with members and some other invited expertise to discuss the future of the SP and its sustainability challenges this week, and we will be making some additional public announcements about our plans and design ideas in the near future. We're not in a big rush on this, but hope to keep this conversation moving and maintain some momentum so that once additional time is freed up later this year we can hit the ground running.

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