This article gives an overview about the release modalities of UCS@school, e.g. when or how often releases happen, what kinds of releases are possible and what can be expected for each one.
Release schedule
UCS@school releases happen on demand as soon as changes are incorporated, there is no fixed schedule for releases.
Generally releases are published from Monday until Thursday, only in special cases there will be a release that is published on the weekend or German holidays.
Release types
UCS@school and additional UCS@school components are installed as apps from the Univention App Center.
These apps are versioned, consist of versioned packages and may be bound to a certain underlying UCS version.
The versioning of UCS@school follows the convention Major.Minor vPatchlevel, so for example 5.0 v3 translates to major release 5, minor release 0, patchlevel release 3.
Major and Minor releases of UCS@school are coupled to the corresponding Major and Minor version of UCS. This means that UCS@school 5.0 v3 require an underlying UCS installation of 5.0.
They are released as an app update with checks in place to prevent the update if this requirement is not met.
Patchlevel releases are not as tightly coupled to UCS releases as major and minor releases are and do not require a certain UCS patchlevel per se, the patchlevel for UCS and UCS@school can differ (for example the latest UCS patchlevel for 4.3 was 4.3-5 while the latest UCS@school 4.3 patchlevel was 4.3 v9).
However, as with any app, there might be a requirement of a certain UCS patchlevel (but not errata) version for the UCS@school app. This means that the app update is blocked as long as the underlying UCS is not updated to the required version or later.
They are released as an app update with checks in place to prevent the update if this requirement is not met.
Package updates of UCS@school packages, which correspond to UCS errata updates, do not require a certain UCS version.
They are not released as an app update but via publishing new versions of the included packages. Because there are no version requirements on the UCS level only the normal package versioning conventions apply and updates are not prevented via additional checks.
Maintenance cycles
An overview on how long a release is maintained can be found here: UCS@school — Univention documentation
Release announcements
New major, minor or patchlevel releases are announced via our App Center News as they are published with an app update.
Additionally they are also announced here: Release-Ankündigungen für UCS@school 5.0 (Stand: 03.08.2023)
Package releases are only announced via the link above.
Release notes / Changelogs
Detailed information for the scope of each release is published as part of our product documentation: https://docs.software-univention.de/release-notes_5.0.html.en