ANN: pandas v0.18.0rc1 - RELEASE CANDIDATE

[Jeff Reback]

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