1.9a1

[sgillies]

The first 1.9 pre-release is ready for early testing. Not all of the features planned for 1.9.0 are in this release, and some of the features here may yet be modified. Please pay close attention to the deprecations and packaging changes.

The binary wheels on PyPI include GDAL 3.5.0 and PROJ 9.0.0, the latest versions of each.

Deprecations:

• The fiona.drivers() function has been deprecated and will be removed in version 2.0. It should be replaced by fiona.Env().
• The new fiona.meta module will be renamed to fiona.drivers in version 2.0.

Packaging:

• Source distributions contain no C source files and require Cython to create them from .pyx files (BUG: force sdist to cythonize files, rather than keeping cythonized files #1096).

Changes:

• Shims for various versions of GDAL have been removed and are replaced by Cython compilation conditions (REF: Use compile_time_env in place of shims #1093).
• Use of CURL_CA_BUNDLE environment variable is replaced by a more specific GDAL/PROJ_CURL_CA_BUNDLE (BUG: Set GDAL/PROJ_CURL_CA_BUNDLE environment #1095).
• Fiona's feature accessors now return instances of fiona.model.Feature instead of Python dicts (Add Feature, Geometry and ObjectEncoder classes to model #787). The Feature class is compatible with code that expects GeoJSON-like dicts but also provides id, geometry, and properties attributes. The last two of these are instances of fiona.model.Geometry and fiona.model.Properties.
• GDAL 3.1.0 is the minimum GDAL version.
• Drop Python 2, and establish Python 3.7 as the minimum version (Establish minimum Python version 3.6 for maint-1.9 branch #1079).
• Remove six and reduce footprint of fiona.compat (Remove 'six' module use; reduce footprint of 'fiona.compat' #985).

New features:

• The appropriate format driver can be detected from filename in write mode (ENH: Auto-detect driver in writing mode #948).
• Driver metadata including dataset open and dataset and layer creations options are now exposed through methods of the fiona.meta module (Expose GDALs metadata #950).
• CRS WKT format support (ENH: Add WKT format support #979).
• Add 'where' SQL clause to set attribute filter (Add 'where' SQL clause to set attribute filter #961, ENH: Add 'where' SQL clause to set attribute filter #1097).

Bug fixes:

• Env and Session classes have been updated for parity with rasterio and to resolve a credential refresh bug (DriverError: Operation timed out when opening shapefile with geopandas from S3 bucket #1055).

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This discussion was created from the release 1.9a1.