Volttron

This is a small release that provides an locking of third party dependencies at "good versions".

In addition after updating one should have a volttron version of 5.0.1

VOLTTRON 5.0 ties together several important new features that have been developed throughout the year which improve performance, usability, and flexibility. These features have been developed with backwards compatibility in mind and are either optional or require no changes to use. After updating to 5.0, agents should be rebuilt but require no changes to code.

This is the full release for the 5.0 version of VOLTTRON. This full release incorporates numerous fixes and feedback from users during the release candidate period.

The major changes from RC2 include:

- Fixed an agent lifecycle bug which could cause agents to not shut down cleanly. This could affect historians and lead to data loss
- Incorporated ModbusTK driver
- Incorporated OpenADR VTN and VEN agent
- VOLTTRON Central BACnet device discovery code refactored


To see the commit log between this release and the rc2 release:

VOLTTRON 5.0 ties together several important new features that have been developed throughout the year which improve performance, usability, and flexibility. These features have been developed with backwards compatibility in mind and are either optional or require no changes to use. After updating to 5.0, agents should be rebuilt but require no changes to code.

This is the second release candidate for the 5.0 version of VOLTTRON. This release touches a large number of files primarily because the VOLTTRON license has been changed to an Apache 2.0 license.

The following bugs/housekeeping items were fixed during the rc1 period:

- Bacnet scanning in volttron central has been updated to use the same code that the command line bacnet scan uses.
- Documentation was updated to allow better navigation in the workthroughs/ide setups.
- Tagging documentation was updated.
- ./start-volttron and ./stop-volttron scripts were added to aide in simple starting stopping of single instances (be sure to look at what these do before using in production)
- pycharm-launch script - added option to explicitly not include a config file from the root of the agent directory.
- bug fixed for thread (documentation bug) for low powered systems.

Additional agents added:
- Market service agent and base agent with examples
- A contributed Kafka agent.

To see the commit log between this release and the rc1 release: https://github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron/compare/5.0rc1...5.0rc2

Known Issues

- The simple web example has been broken by an api change that allows the user to specify return type, status and response headers. This will be fixed before the 5.0 final release.

VOLTTRON 5.0 ties together several important new features that have been developed throughout the year which improve performance, usability, and flexibility. These features have been developed with backwards compatibility in mind and are either optional or require no changes to use. After updating to 5.0, agents should be rebuilt but require no changes to code.

VOLTTRON 5.0 is being released as a release candidate prior to becoming the default version for the repository. This is to give the community time to try out the new features and provide feedback.


Major new features include:

* Message Bus performance improvements
* A major refactor of the message bus improves the speed of publishes by 4 - 10 times
* Requires no changes to existing agents and services to use
* Simplified Multi-Platform
* Platforms can be configured as peers allowing their topics to be shared across participating platforms
* Agents can publish/subscribe to remote topics without knowing which platform the topic is on
* Tagging Service
* Topics can be assigned metadata tags
* Agents can lookup topics by these tags to dynamically configure their subscriptions

Other improvements include:

* Historians
* Historians utilize configuration store
* Crate historian solidified and ready for deployment
* ForwardHistorian improvements including option to pause forwarding
* Significant ForwardHistorian and DataMover memory and file handler leak fixed. Affected spotty connection and cases where the target platform may be disconnected for long periods of time.
* DataMover historian provides an alternative to FowardHistorian for remotely storing data without needing to republish it
* Drivers
* SEP2.0 historian contributed
* Ability to group devices to allow load balancing of scraping to avoid overloading devices and networks (developed to alleviate issues collecting from MS-TP trunk)
* Documentation
* Jupyter training notebooks for quickstart of learning VOLTTRON
* Message bus debugging tool to provide visibility during application development

Maintenance update to allow people to continue using 4.1 with wheel and virtualenv infrastructure.

Fixes 1668, 1660, 1669, and 1671