Im a bit more nervous about this as some of these I either know will break stuff or has a good probability to break things. I.e. hsql dependecy change.

With that said I think, I think we can still do this, but on these conditons:

1. We do it next release. This release has been postponed far too long and should only accept bug fixes at this point.
2. We break these into smaller changes. I.e. do the lucene change in one pr, some of the smaller stuff grouped into another pr.

Yeah, fair enough, I think it should be a different release.
Some of these changes are not backwards-compatible (the lucene upgrade, for instance, requires rebuilding indexes).

Wanted to put this PR up to get some reviews. I will break it up into smaller changes.
Haven't started debugging hsql problems yet (seems to be breaking on enforcing the varchar size declaration).

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. Thank you for your contributions.

@randomnicode any chance you're still willing to work on this? I'd like to bump the dependencies too, maybe I can help.

@jvoisin Sorry, I've been away. Thanks for continuing the work.

Glad to have you back, and happy to see that someone who actually knows what they're doing is taking this over!