During June of 2019 Liferay will switch the DXP fix pack releases from weekly to monthly frequency. (This cadence has changed for DXP 7.0 fix packs. You can read about this change here.) The fix pack’s format and installation procedures won’t change. Hotfixes will be available in case a fix is needed before the monthly fix pack release. This change is to help our customers’ project dependency management in two ways: 1) blocker issues can be resolved in a hotfix quickly with less integration cost and 2) other changes can be planned using our stable fix pack schedule. Please see our recommendation for patching Liferay DXP in your projects’ lifecycle.

With this change we also introduce a predictable Service Pack cycle. With every 3rd fix pack we’ll release a new Service Pack. As before, existing customers won’t need to rebuild their environment on the latest Service Packs to get the updates: installing the latest fix pack and Marketplace applications will result in the same binary. There will be an additional option to download “Slim Service Packs,” which are the very same code base as traditional SPs. However they will be one third of the general SP in size - we’ve removed the patch and patching information. Slim Service Packs are a fresh start and are recommended for demos and installations where disk space is limited or costly. General fix pack installations can also be made slim using the patching-tool separate command.

Security Fix Pack Improvements

We will change how severity 1 and 2 security patches are released. In the past our security patches included additional bug fixes, however after July 2019, we will be able to deliver future security fix packs that only contain changes required to address critical security issues. They depend on the latest fix pack available at the time of release. Customers on an earlier fix pack version can optionally request a security hotfix to patch their systems.  And as always, security hotfixes are available to customers for all active versions.