some documentation updates including date stamp

dat/history

@@ -274,6 +274,70 @@ some bug fixes.
 NetHack 3.6.7 was released on February 16, 2023 containing a security fix and
 some bug fixes.
 
+Development work for the major release to follow NetHack 3.6 began in 2015
+around the same time as NetHack 3.6.0 was being released. That development
+work continued in parallel to each of the NetHack 3.6 releases from 2015
+through 2023, and continued until the end of April 2026.  For the first time,
+that development was shared publicly on GitHub and SourceForge as it occurred.
+It was done under the label NetHack-3.7 work-in-progress (WIP), although the
+version number for the next release had not yet been solidified.
+
+Exposure of the development to the public brought many good things, and some
+challenges. People were able to observe and criticize changes and new features
+almost immediately, and they often did. The GitHub pull request system made
+it straightforward for people to contribute directly to development.
+Contributions resolved many, many bugs in the game and we thank all the
+contributors.
+
+In early 2026, with the game development getting stable enough to consider
+initiating an official release, the devteam reviewed the nature and number of
+changes in the game. It was clear that there was sufficient depth and
+breadth to warrant a major release and version 5.0 was decided on.
+That's a new major release over 3.x, without opening up any ambiguity
+or confusion with existing variants that there might have been had it
+been released as version 4.0.
+
+NetHack 5.0.0 was released on May 2, 2026.
+
+The source code for NetHack 5.0.0 was modified and modernized to be
+compliant with standard C99. The 5.0.0 release contained over 3100 fixes,
+changes, and updated features.
+
+NetHack 5.0 was the first version to replace the lex and yacc level
+and dungeon compilers of past versions, with a new Lua interpreter-based
+approach to provide those elements. Lua is also used for the quest texts
+in NetHack 5.0.0. The entire development team acknowledges the work
+done by Pasi Kallinen to make that happen.
+
+At the time of the NetHack 5.0 release, the core development team,
+active and erstwhile, included Warwick Allison, Michael Allison,
+Ken Arromdee, David Cohrs, Jessie Collet, Bart House, Kevin Hugo,
+Pasi Kallinen, Ken Lorber, Dean Luick, Pat Rankin, Derek S. Ray,
+Alex Smith, Patric Mueller, Mike Stephenson, Janet Walz, Paul Winner.
+
+Ken Lorber, Pat Rankin, Patrick Mueller and Michael Allison helped ensure
+that NetHack 5.0 would run on macOS.
+
+Ingo Paschke somehow managed to revive a NetHack 5.0 port for the Amiga,
+using a cross-compiler on a modern platform to do so. His work was shared
+so others can straightforwardly produce NetHack 5.0 for the Amiga thanks
+to his efforts.
+
+Ray Chason contributed the majority of maintenance work for the NetHack 5.0
+MS-DOS port, including porting the curses interface to it.
+Michael Allison ensured that NetHack 5.0 core changes continued to work
+with the msdos port and keep it alive.  Cross-compiling the MS-DOS port
+has helped make that possible and mostly painless.
+
+People that contributed to the Windows port of NetHack 5.0 since the
+development of NetHack 5.0 begain over eleven years ago, included
+Michael Allison, David Cohrs, Bart House, Pasi Kallinen, Alex Kompel,
+Dion Nicolaas, Derek S. Ray and Yitzhak Sapir.
+
+With sadness, the devteam would like to acknowledge and remember the past
+contributions from the late Ron Van Iwaarden, who was the sole maintainer
+of NetHack for OS/2 for several past NetHack releases. Ron will be missed.
+
 The official NetHack web site is maintained by Ken Lorber at
 https://www.nethack.org/.