So you are probably reading sas7bdat, which was put in AFTER 0.18.0rc1 was cut (if you are reading xport format then you are good to go), otherwise you may want to wait a bit for 0.18.0rc2. On Sunday, February 28, 2016 at 1:42:53 PM UTC-5, John E wrote:

OK, thanks, I got it. Although... I would consider pandas.pydata.org to be a common end user gateway and if one starts there they will read "We recommend that *all *users upgrade to this version." And then if they scroll down a short distance they will see a single line instruction for installing via conda: "conda install pandas=v0.18.0rc1 -c pandas".

And also somewhat confusing to me about pandas.pydata.org is that looking to the right, you have a choice of RC, dev, and previous releases, but nothing that says something like "current, stable release".

Anyways.... quite possibly this is confusing only to me, and not others, but I thought I'd mention it just in case. FWIW.

I've now installed 0.18.0rc1 and will try to test out some of the newer features. I'm really interested to see how well the SAS reader works (i.e. how fast). I hate SAS myself, but this would be a really, really nice feature for my organization and likely increase adoption of python & pandas.

On Sunday, February 28, 2016 at 12:03:45 PM UTC-5, Jeff wrote:

...

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-enhancements-moments> . - 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-enhancements-rangeindex> . - API breaking .resample changes to make it more .groupby like, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-breaking-resample> - 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-float-indexers> - 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-enhancements-xarray> . - Addition of the .str.extractall() method <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-enhancements-extractall>, and API changes to the the .str.extract() method <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-enhancements-extract>, and the .str.cat() method <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0180-enhancements-strcat> - 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-pandas-with-anaconda> 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