[Numpy-discussion] ANN: pandas v0.19.0rc1 - RELEASE CANDIDATE

[Joris Van den Bossche]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first release candidate of
Pandas 0.19.0. Please try this RC and report any issues at the pandas issue
tracker <https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues>.

The release candidate can be installed with conda from our development
channel (builds for osx-64, linux-64 and win-64 are available for Python
2.7, 3.4 and 3.5):

conda install -c pandas pandas=0.19.0rc1

or with pip from PyPI <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pandas/0.19.0rc1>
(wheels are available):

pip install --pre pandas==0.19.0rc1

---
THIS IS NOT A PRODUCTION RELEASE

This is a major release from 0.18.1 and includes a number of API changes,
several new features, enhancements, and performance improvements along with
a large number of bug fixes.

Highlights include:

- New method merge_asof for asof-style time-series joining, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-enhancements-asof-merge>
- The .rolling() method is now time-series aware, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-enhancements-rolling-ts>
- read_csv now supports parsing Categorical data, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-enhancements-read-csv-categorical>
- A function union_categorical has been added for combining
categoricals, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-enhancements-union-categoricals>
- PeriodIndex now has its own period dtype, and changed to be more
consistent with other Index classes. See here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-api-period>
- Sparse data structures gained enhanced support of int and bool dtypes,
see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-sparse>
- Comparison operations with Series no longer ignores the index, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-api-series-ops>
for an overview of the API changes.
- Introduction of a pandas development API for utility functions, see
here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-dev-api>
.
- Deprecation of Panel4D and PanelND. We recommend to represent these
types of n-dimensional data with the xarray package
<http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/>.
- Removal of the previously deprecated modules pandas.io.data,
pandas.io.wb, pandas.tools.rplot.

See the Whatsnew
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html> file for
more information. Please report any issues here
<https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/>.

A big thanks to all contributors!

Joris