[Numpy-discussion] ANN: pandas v0.17.0rc1 - RELEASE CANDIDATE

[Jeff Reback]

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first release candidate of
Pandas 0.17.0.
Please try this RC and report any issues here: Pandas Issues
<https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/10848>
We will be releasing officially in 1-2 weeks or so.

**RELEASE CANDIDATE 1**

This is a major release from 0.16.2 and includes a small number of API
changes, several new features, enhancements, and performance improvements
along with a large number of bug fixes. We recommend that all users upgrade
to this version.

Highlights include:


- Release the Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) on some cython operations,
see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0170-gil>
- Plotting methods are now available as attributes of the .plot
accessor, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0170-plot>
- The sorting API has been revamped to remove some long-time
inconsistencies, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0170-api-breaking-sorting>
- Support for a datetime64[ns] with timezones as a first-class dtype,
see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0170-tz>
- The default for to_datetime will now be to raise when presented with
unparseable formats, previously this would return the original input, see
here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0170-api-breaking-to-datetime>
- The default for dropna in HDFStore has changed to False, to store by
default all rows even if they are all NaN, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0170-api-breaking-hdf-dropna>
- Support for Series.dt.strftime to generate formatted strings for
datetime-likes, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0170-strftime>
- Development installed versions of pandas will now have PEP440
compliant version strings GH9518
<https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/9518>
- Development support for benchmarking with the Air Speed Velocity
library GH8316 <https://github.com/pydata/pandas/pull/8316>
- Support for reading SAS xport files, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0170-enhancements-sas-xport>
- Removal of the automatic TimeSeries broadcasting, deprecated since
0.8.0, see here
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0170-prior-deprecations>

See the Whatsnew
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html> for much
more information.

Best way to get this is to install via conda
<http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/install.html#installing-pandas-with-anaconda>
from
our development channel. Builds for osx-64,linux-64,win-64 for Python 2.7
and Python 3.4 are all available.

conda install pandas -c pandas

Thanks to all who made this release happen. It is a very large release!

Jeff