Apache CouchDB® 3.4.1 has been released and is available for download. It is a feature and bugfix release, and was originally published on 2024-09-27.
We had 3.4.0 almost ready to be released and mere hours before making it official, we realised that a new feature could lead to an unsatisfactory scenario for some users. Namely: the automatic upgrading of password hashes to a stronger algorithm could lead to folks upgrading to 3.4.0 and them not being able to roll back to the previous version without locking out users that have had their password hashes automatically upgrade.
The CouchDB team aims to make every release safe to upgrade, aside from major releases with well-documented breaking changes. So 3.4.0 would not be safe to upgrade and we decided to not announce its availability, even though everything was ready to go.
Instead we immediately fast-tracked version 3.4.1 that disabled the feature by default and this is instead the release that is safe to upgrade to. Please note that the new hashing algorithm is still enabled by default. User accounts created after the upgrade will not be able to downgrade.