These are pre-releases. In other words, we would want the community to test out before an official release, and see if there are any show stoppers. The docs are setup for the official releases. These are not put into official channels at all (that is the point), e.g. not on PyPi, nor in the conda main channels. Only official releases will go there. Generally we will try to do release candidates before major changes, but not before minor changes. So the official release of 0.18.0 has not happened yet! (in fact going to do a v0.18.0rc2 next week). We would love for you to test out! Jeff On Sunday, February 28, 2016 at 11:50:57 AM UTC-5, John E wrote:

I hope this doesn't come across as a trivial, semantical question, but...

The initial releases of the last 2 or so versions have been labelled as "release candidates" but still say "We recommend that all users upgrade to this version."

So this is a little confusing to me for using pandas in a production environment. "Release candidate" seems to suggest that you should wait for 0.18.1, but the note unambiguously says not to wait. So which interpretation is recommended for a production environment?

On Saturday, February 13, 2016 at 7:53:18 PM UTC-5, Jeff wrote:

...

Hi,

I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first release candidate of Pandas 0.18.0. Please try this RC and report any issues here: Pandas Issues <https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues> We will be releasing officially in 1-2 weeks or so.

**RELEASE CANDIDATE 1**

This is a major release from 0.17.1 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:

- pandas >= 0.18.0 will no longer support compatibility with Python version 2.6 GH7718 <https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/7718> or version 3.3 GH11273 <https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/11273> - Moving and expanding window functions are now methods on Series and DataFrame similar to .groupby like objects, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-...> . - Adding support for a RangeIndex as a specialized form of the Int64Index for memory savings, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-...> . - API breaking .resample changes to make it more .groupby like, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-...> - Removal of support for positional indexing with floats, which was deprecated since 0.14.0. This will now raise a TypeError, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-...> - The .to_xarray() function has been added for compatibility with the xarray package <http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/> see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-...> . - Addition of the .str.extractall() method <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-...>, and API changes to the the .str.extract() method <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-...>, and the .str.cat() method <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-...> - pd.test() top-level nose test runner is available GH4327 <https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/4327>

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-pand...> from our development channel. Builds for osx-64,linux-64,win-64 for Python 2.7 and Python 3.5 are all available.

conda install pandas=v0.18.0rc1 -c pandas

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

Jeff