PyIceberg 0.5.0 release

[Fokko Driesprong <fo...@apache.org>]

Hi everyone,

As mentioned in the latest Iceberg sync, I'd love to do another Python
release. I would like to reach out to the community to see if there is
anything we should include.

I know that it was promised that the next release would have to write
support, but so many features have already accumulated, and we want don't
want to rush write support, I would suggest doing a release in between to
get it out to the public.

A summary of what's on master:

   - Add gzip metadata support <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/7984>
   - PyArrow HDFS support <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/7997>
   - Support serverless environments (AWS Lambda)
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8061>
   - Many fixes around Avro performance (PRs 1
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8074>, 2
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8075>, 3
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8082>, 4
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8084>)
   - Remove the upper bound of PyParsing dependency
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8116> (blocking a PR in Airflow
   <https://github.com/apache/airflow/pull/32786>)
   - Moving the reading of Avro to Cython
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8134> (10x speed improvement(!))
   - Support for the SQLCatalog
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/7921> (JDBC in Java)
   - Fix support for UUID columns
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8267>
   - A lot of bugfixes!

What I think we should include (but please feel free to add anything to
this list):

   - Support for adding columns
   <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8174>
   - Optimize concurrency <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/8104>
   (follow up on the Support servless environments)
   - Bump Pydantic to v2 <https://github.com/apache/iceberg/pull/7782>
   (this will unblock PyIceberg Polars integration
   <https://github.com/pola-rs/polars/pull/10375>, and improve performance
   of the JSON (de)serialization)

I've added those to the 0.5.0 milestone
<https://github.com/apache/iceberg/milestone/30>. Feel free to reach out if
you think anything is missing, otherwise we can proceed with the release.
Also, everyone is invited to review the open PR's :)

Cheers, Fokko