Importance notice regarding upcoming ESAPI planned releases for 3Q and 4Q2024

[kwwall]

• For 3Q2024: I am currently preparing ESAPI 2.5.5.0 which I hope to complete by no later than 2024-09-23. Because of that, I will not be merging any further commits except thus from our current core team (myself, @xeno6696, and @jeremiahjstacey).For everyone else, there is a code freeze until after this release is out. You can of course submit PRs, but we likely won't be looking at them until after 2.5.5.0 is released.
• For 4Q2024: I have 1 planned release, tentatively will be 2.6.0.0. Thus far, the only planned change for that release is to delete the Validator.isValdSafeHTML and DefaultValidator.isValidSafeHTML in accordance with the deprecation notice announced in GitHub Security Advisory GHSA-r68h-jhhj-9jvm. That release is tentatively planned for 2024-11-24 or a few days afterwards. If you are using the interface Validator.isValdSafeHTML, you only have until the planned 2.6.0.0 release to address it. See the referenced security advisory for details.

[kwwall]

Update on next release (2.5.5.0): As you've noticed, 9/23 has come and gone without a new ESAPI release. I apologize for that. For once in a long time, I am having trouble getting motivated to do a release (not that ever was something that's been "fun" mind you). I'm going to try give it another shot later this week. After that last PR, I realized that our README.md file needs a substantial rewrite and reorganization and at the moment, I'm having trouble getting the fortitude to do that.

[kwwall]

Okay. I got distracted by football, what can I say, but I have made some progress. You can follow my progress at https://github.com/kwwall/esapi-java-legacy/tree/release-prep-2.5.5.0 if you want. But after working at least 2 hours OT Tues through Fri last week, I really needed to unwind.