Hello world! 
As you may be aware, the Open edX community is currently working on building the next Open edX named release. Currently, Tutor supports the “Ironwood” release. (releases are named after trees, in increasing alphabetical order) The next release, named “Juniper”, is scheduled to come out later this month.
What’s the release status?
The provisional release date decided by the Open edX Build/Test/Release working group (which I help manage) is May 21st. We are hard at work to stay on course and meet this deadline.
Here is a list of issues that need to be fixed before we can tag the release: https://openedx.atlassian.net/browse/CRI-171 All issues in this list are assumed to be “release blockers”. In other words, we will only be able to release Juniper once this list is empty.
The current “release candidate” tag is “open-release/juniper.rc2”. All relevant Open edX repositories now have this rc2 tag; we then expect to create an rc3 tag, which will be very close to the final release.
How can you help?
Easy 
Follow the instructions here.
What does it mean for Tutor?
We are doing our best to release a new Tutor version on the day of the Juniper release, or shortly after. This release will be v10.0.0 (as “j” is the 10th letter of the alphabet).
Here is the upgrade status for all Tutor projects: check marks are for projects that have been successfuly upgraded, a red cross means that we are working on it. This list will be updated in the coming days/weeks to track our upgrade progress.
Main project
-
tutor-openedx: The Tutor binary now works with Juniper. We still need to resolve a few details and test the upgrade path from Ironwood.
Plugins
-
tutor-discovery (updated: May 29th 2020)
-
tutor-ecommerce (updated: June 2020)
-
tutor-figures: pending on an upgrade from Appsembler, the original authors of Figures -
tutor-minio This was made more difficult by a necessary upgrade of the
botolibrary toboto3(updated: May 27th 2020) -
tutor-notes
-
tutor-xqueue
Extra components
-
indigo (updated: May 18th 2020)
-
Scorm XBlock (updated: May 18th 2020)
Premium plugins
What does it mean for existing Tutor users?
Juniper will not contain staggering changes, in terms of features. However, it is an important release in terms of technical upgrades: Ironwood, the previous release, runs on Python 2.7 and Django 1.11, which no longer receive security updates since January 1st 2020 and April 1st 2020, respectively. So it is extremely important that any platform running Ironwood upgrades as quickly as possible to Juniper.
EdX (the company behind Open edX) will stop supporting Ironwood the day Juniper comes out. Similarly, we will not be able to support free users running Ironwood after Juniper comes out. Tutor users will benefit from a streamlined, easy-to-run upgrade process. (As opposed to the native installation for which you are supposed to trash and recreate the server to upgrade your platform)
What if you need more time to upgrade?
But some users might want to keep running Ironwood for some time. For instance, this might be the case if you have made extensive changes to the core Open edX code and you need some time to port those changes to Juniper. For this reason, we offer bug fixes and support for two years to our Long Term Support (LTS) customers.
As usual, let us know what you think in the comments!
I’ll edit it, but you’re right that we will have to wait for Appsembler to upgrade their code.
