Netty 5.0.0.Alpha1 released

We are happy to announce the first Alpha release of the upcoming netty 5.0.0. This release is a big milestone for us and the community as it will allow users to easily consume changes and give feedback. While it is still a long road to the final release we expect things to become more stable with each release and so make it easier for people to keep up-to-date.

To make it easier to experiment with netty 5 while still use 4.1 at the same time we decided to take the effort and put it into a different package. This allows to have both version co-exist at the same time. As this a new major version we also started to introduce breaking changes where it makes sense. These changes were mostly motivation by lessons learned during the life-time of netty 4.1.x. We really hope you enjoy these changes and if not provide feedback in what we should address :)

We will soon start to change the default branch of netty to main and so be more strict about changes that will be accepted for 4.1. While this might sound like a "limitation" it will help to keep the possibility of a regression to a minimum for 4.1. Important bugfixes will of course still be ported to 4.1 as well. With all this said we don't plan to stop supporting 4.1.x any time soon. Both versions will be supported in parallel for now.

To help users to try the next major version of netty we started to write down all the "required" things to do in terms of migrating netty 4.1.x code to 5.0.0. The migration guide can be found on our website.