Remo: to be fair, 2.4 is not "outdated" yet, since there's been a bugfix release in January (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/2.4/release-notes-2.4.4.html).

Also, Hibernate Search version 5.7 has been expected by users for quite some time, and thus we won't delay it any more. It's planned for release in mid-february, and we're working on fixing several issues with 5.7 before this deadline.

That being said, we are aware that the lack of support for ES 5.x is an issue and that it won't fix itself, so we are also working on this:

• we followed the evolution of ES 5 closely, most notably the changes that occurred in ES around the keyword datatype, which was initially only partially implemented (no support for what was eventually named "normalizers").
• we introduced features in 5.6 that pave the way for 5.x support, most notably support for propagating analyzer definitions from Hibernate Search to Elasticsearch.
• we have work in progress to identify the actual required changes in Hibernate Search to support 5.x, which will be the first step for implementing dialects.

But there are still issues, and for now I cannot give you a release date, or even a version number. It will mainly depend on the complexity of the changes. We will keep you updated on this ticket.