[Help-gnunet] GNUnet 0.5.0 released

[Christian Grothoff]

Hi all!

Finally, the core development team has decided that 0.5.0 is ready to be 
released. This release is probably the largest single step in the development 
of GNUnet so far. Here's the round-up:

The new release is incompatible in pretty much every respect
compared to 0.4.7 and all prior versions. The peers will not be able to 
interact, the format of the host advertisements (with the public keys) has 
changed and the old content encoding can not be migrated to the new format 
(except by re-insertion).

But there is also good news:
* transport abstraction layer with support for UDP, TCP and SMTP
* application abstraction layer (see gnunet-chat for a demo-application)
* new content encoding with super-queries to request up to 25k in one message 
and CHK style DBlocks and IBlocks for even more security
* Bloom filters for the reduction of disk-accesses (no disk-access required 
for queries that are not available locally)
* better heuristics for routing
* faster timers for better performance
* more accurate resource management
* gnunet-transport-check to test the transport services
* gnunet-tbench to measure link-to-link throughput
* gnunet-stats with even more statistics in uniform format
* gnunet-gtk got a bit nicer
* the GNUnet core is now designed as a peer-to-peer framework providing:
  - peer discovery
  - authentication
  - link-to-link encrypted communication
  - resource management
  - unreliable (!) peer-to-peer communication
  - transport abstraction (applications are not concerned with the choice of 
transport)
  - trust economy
  - extensive documentation and programming examples
* and other things we probably forgot about

So go ahead and unwrap (eh, unpack) your Christmas present.
As usual, please report bugs at http://www.ovmj.org/~mantis/. More has
changed in this release than in any previous release, so please give us 
feedback (Krista wants to remind you that presents, cookies and other 
Christmas goodies are strictly optional; Igor says live long and prosper & 
Blake warns about using the TCP transport under BSD. To this, I have nothing 
to add... :-).

Christian