proposal to release in next couple of weeks

[Pádraig Brady]

It's been 10 months since the last release
and we currently have a good cohesive set of changes.

Since this release has a lot of performance related improvements,
I'd like to also include a performance improvement to the md5sum
and sha*sum utilities that I've started looking at and
hope to complete in the next couple of days.

Are there other bug/performance changes that
anyone would like to see included in the next release?

I realise there are some outstanding patches containing
new functionality, and I hope to merge those in
a subsequent release that would have a shorter cycle
than this one.

thanks,
Pádraig.