5.1. Differentiation of update variants / UCS versions#
Four types of UCS updates are differentiated:
- Major releases
Major releases appear approximately every three to four years. Major releases can differ significantly from previous major releases in terms of their scope of services, functioning and the software they contain.
- Minor releases
During the maintenance period of a major release, minor releases are released approximately every 10-12 months. These updates include corrections to recently identified errors and the expansion of the product with additional features. At the same time and as far as this is possible, the minor releases are compatible with the previous versions in terms of their functioning, interfaces and operation. Should a change in behavior prove practical or unavoidable, this will be noted in the release notes when the new version is published.
- Patchlevel releases
Patchlevel releases are released approximately every three months and combine all errata updates published until then.
- Errata updates
Univention continuously releases errata updates. Errata updates provide fixes for security vulnerabilities, bug fixes, and smaller enhancements to make them available to customer systems quickly. An overview of all errata updates can be found at https://errata.software-univention.de/.
Every released UCS version has an unambiguous version number; it is composed of a figure (the major version), a full stop, a second figure (the minor version), a hyphen and a third figure (the patch level version). The version UCS 4.2-1 thus refers to the first patch level update for the second minor update for the major release UCS 4.
The pre-update script preup.sh is run before every release update. It
checks for example whether any problems exist, in which case the update is
canceled in a controlled manner. The post-update script postup.sh is
run at the end of the update to perform additional cleanups, if necessary.
Errata updates always refer to certain minor releases, e.g., for UCS 5.0. Errata updates can generally be installed for all patch level versions of a minor release.
If a new release or errata updates are available, a corresponding notification is given when a user opens a UMC module. The availability of new updates is also notified via email; the corresponding newsletters - separated into release and error updates - can be subscribed on the Univention website. A changelog document is published for every release update listing the updated packages, information on error corrections and new functions and references to the Univention Bugzilla.