The 19th Open edX community release will be named Sumac. It will be released Dec 9th, 2024. The open-release/sumac.master branches will be created one month earlier, on November 9th. Code on master/main as of November 9th will be part of Sumac. Code merged after that will need special handling to be part of Sumac.

Put stuff here that we have to remember when we start packaging up Sumac.  Especially important is information that system installers or operators will need to know. Please include your name when you add an item, so that we can get back to you with questions.

Operational

• Course asset middleware converted to view — @Tim McCormack

  • Background: The LMS/CMS previously handled course asset requests (asset-v1: andc4x URLs) via a middleware called StaticContentServer. This middleware has been converted to a view.

  • Action: If your deployment has a custom MIDDLEWARE list in Django, you will need to remove this item at the time of upgrade to Sumac. Otherwise, no action is needed.

• Ubuntu 22.04 Related Operators Note – @Feanil Patel

  • See build!: Switch to ubuntu-latest for builds by feanil · Pull Request #35450 · openedx/edx-platform for details

    • In newer versions of ubuntu the MD4 hashing algorithm
      is disabled by default. To enable it the openssl config needs to be
      updated in a manner similar to what's being done here. Alternatively,
      you can set the FEATURES['ENABLE_BLAKE2B_HASHING'] setting to True
      which will switch to a newer hashing algorithm where MD4 was previously
      used.

      Because this hashing is being used as a part of the edx-platform caching
      mechanism, this will effectively clear the cache for the items that use
      this hash. The will impact any items where the cache key might have been
      too big to store in memcache so it's hard to predict exactly which items
      will be impacted.

• Added override options to commerce related CTA URLs in edx-platform – @Ahtasham ul Hassan

  • Background: Extension points have been added have been added to commerce app in: PR1, PR2 so openedX community members who wants to extend the commerce functionality can do so without explicitly adding code into edx-platform codebase. For more information into extension points see Pluggable override section in : edx-platform/docs/concepts/extension_points.rst at master · openedx/edx-platform

  • Additional Considerations: Commerce app itself is slated for deprecation nevertheless.

• How to setup Aspects, our learner analytics product, on your instance: See the Aspects configuration documentation to learn about setting up Aspects for your production environment or the upgrade documentation to upgrade Aspects if you’re already using it.

Deprecations and Removals

• In frontend-app-learner-dashboard — @Max Frank

  • support for Optimizely has been removed along with the ProductRecommendations widget

    • [DEPR]: Optimizely support · Issue #387 · openedx/frontend-app-learner-dashboard

  • removed the RecommendationsPanel widget

    • [DEPR]: RecommendationsPanel · Issue #410 · openedx/frontend-app-learner-dashboard

• In edx-platform – @Ahtasham ul Hassan

  • commerce-coordinator related code has been removed.

    • feat: remove commerce coordinator business specific code from edx-platform by attiyaIshaque · Pull Request #35527 · openedx/edx-platform

Placeholder: Things moved to plugins

(We want to be able to celebrate things like [DEPR]: ZendeskFab Component · Issue #496 · openedx/frontend-app-learner-dashboard , where advances in pluggability have allowed us to extract functionality out of our base install (even though this exact thing won’t be removed until Teak). 'cc @Sarina Canelake )