v0.53.1

• Removed packaging package dependency (#3469). In this release, we have removed the dependency on the packaging package in the open-source library to address a release issue. The import statements for "packaging.version.Version" and "packaging.version.InvalidVersion" have been removed. The function _external_hms in the federation.py file has been updated to retrieve the Hive Metastore version using the "spark.sql.hive.metastore.version" configuration key and validate it using a regular expression pattern. If the version is not valid, the function logs an informational message and returns None. This change modifies the Hive Metastore version validation logic and improves the overall reliability and maintainability of the library.

Contributors: @FastLee