Octez v18.0 has just been released 
This version is the first major version compatible with the Oxford protocol proposal, currently undergoing the Promotion period of the on-chain governance process.
If Oxford is accepted by the community, please remember to upgrade your infrastructure to Octez v18 with sufficient time before the eventual activation of Oxford – which would happen around October 16th.
Octez v18.0 includes:
- Client commands for manual staked funds management (with Oxford there would no longer be any automatic freezing/unfreezing of baker deposits).
- Renaming
(pre)endorsementsto(pre)attestationsin user interface: RPCs, logging outputs, etc. - Improvements to the operation and block validation processes.
- A new experimental binary for deploying Data Availability Committees, in order to facilitate higher throughput for Smart Rollups.
- The v18.0 Oxford baker includes an
--adaptive-issuance-voteoption for bakers to manifest their participation in the separate feature activation vote for Adaptive Issuance and Staking. - A fix for a concurrency issue in the logging infrastructure which can cause the node to become temporarily unresponsive.
v18.0 introduces a new snapshot format (version 6). Upon execution of a v18.0 node, its store will automatically and irreversibly be upgraded. Thus, snapshots exported with Octez versions 18.0 or higher cannot be used nor imported by nodes running lower versions.
Please note that starting from Octez v18, Octez Opam packages as a new set containing fewer packages. These changes are transparent for users of the different kinds of Octez distributions. They only impact software developers directly relying on Opam packages within the Octez repository.
A full Changelog and update instructions are available in the version 18 release page:
https://tezos.gitlab.io/releases/version-18.html
The Git tag for this release is v18.0 and the corresponding commit hash is bcea813c2aa8f0cf812752dbb72c89c055621c0a.
