# Apache Airflow 2.6.0 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** Apache Airflow (https://airflow.apache.org)
- **Version:** 2.6.0
- **Released:** Apr 30, 2023
- **Impact Score:** 7/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Source flagged
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/airflow/updates/2.6.0/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Apache Airflow 2.6.0. Source highlight: Default permissions of file task handler log directories and files has been changed to "owner + group" writeable (#29506).

## Breaking Changes & Deprecations
- This is potentially a breaking change for any custom trigger implementations that override the ``cleanup()``

## New Features
- Skip PythonVirtualenvOperator task when it returns a provided exit code (#30690)
- rename skip_exit_code to skip_on_exit_code and allow providing multiple codes (#30692)
- Add skip_on_exit_code also to ExternalPythonOperator (#30738)
- Add ``max_active_tis_per_dagrun`` for Dynamic Task Mapping (#29094)
- Add serializer for pandas dataframe (#30390)
- Deferrable ``TriggerDagRunOperator`` (#30292)

## Improvements
- Rename most pod_id usage to pod_name in KubernetesExecutor (#29147)
- Update the error message for invalid use of poke-only sensors (#30821)
- Update log level in scheduler critical section edge case (#30694)
- AIP-51 Removing Executor Coupling from Core Airflow (`AIP-51 <https://github.com/apache/airflow/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Amerged+label%3AAIP-51+milestone%3A%22Airflow+2.6.0%22>`_)
- Updated app to support configuring the caching hash method for FIPS v2 (#30675)
- Preload airflow imports before dag parsing to save time (#30495)

## Bug Fixes
- Fix static_folder for cli app (#30952)
- Initialize plugins for cli appbuilder (#30934)
- Fix dag file processor heartbeat to run only if necessary (#30899)
- Fix KubernetesExecutor sending state to scheduler (#30872)
- Count mapped upstream only if all are finished (#30641)
- ExternalTaskSensor: add external_task_group_id to template_fields (#30401)