Announcing Gluster Release 5

[Shyam Ranganathan]

The Gluster community is pleased to announce the release of 5.0, our
latest release.

This is a major release that includes a range of code improvements and
stability fixes with some management and standalone features as noted below.

A selection of the key features and changes are documented on this [1] page.

Announcements:

1. Releases that receive maintenance updates post release 5 are, 4.1 and
5. (see [2])

**NOTE:** 3.12 long term maintenance release, will reach end of life
(EOL) with the release of 5.0. (see [2])

2. Release 5 will receive maintenance updates around the 10th of every
month for the first 3 months post release (i.e Nov'18, Dec'18, Jan'19).
Post the initial 3 months, it will receive maintenance updates every 2
months till EOL. (see [3])

Major changes and features:

1) Management:
GlusterD2

IMP: GlusterD2 in Gluster-5 is still considered a preview and is
experimental. It should not be considered ready for production use.
Users should still expect some breaking changes even though all efforts
would be taken to ensure that these can be avoided. As GD2 is still
under heavy development, new features can be expected throughout the
Gluster 5 release.

The following major changes have been committed to GlusterD2 since v4.1.0.
- Volume snapshots
- Volume heal
- Tracing with Opencensus
- Portmap refactoring
- Smartvol API merged with volume create API
- Configure GlusterD2 with environment variables

2) Standalone
- Entry creation and handling, consistency is improved
- Python code in Gluster packages is Python 3 ready
- Quota fsck script to correct quota accounting
- Added noatime option in utime xlator
- Added ctime-invalidation option in quick-read xlator
- Added shard-deletion-rate option in shard xlator
- Removed last usage of MD5 digest in code, towards better FIPS compliance
- Code improvements

3) Bugs Addressed
The release notes[1] also contain bugs addresses in this release.

References:
[1] Release notes: https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/release-notes/5.0/

[2] Release schedule: https://www.gluster.org/release-schedule/

[3] Gluster release cadence and version changes:
https://lists.gluster.org/pipermail/announce/2018-July/000103.html