Wobbly Fiona and Shapely Wheels

On 2017-06-05 I began to use GDAL 2.2.0 in the Fiona binary wheels I upload to the Cheeseshop. I also changed the MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET environment variable from 10.6 to 10.9 in order to get GDAL 2.2.0 to compile. This seems to be the cause of Shapely and Fiona wheel compatibility issues. Have I mentioned that I'm not completely competent at C++ on OS X? I'm not.

My co-worker Matt Perry provided a script that exposed this issue clearly and I bisected in Fiona and Shapely version space until I found the root of the problem.

Until I get new wheels on PyPI, here are the three coping strategies.

  1. Avoid the wheels entirely:

pip install -I --no-binary fiona,shapely fiona==1.7.10 shapely==1.6.2

This is what I do in my Dockerfiles at work. This strategy requires the GDAL and GEOS libraries and headers to be pre-installed on your system, and also Numpy and Cython.

  1. Downgrade Fiona, using wheels:

pip install -I fiona==1.7.6

  1. Downgrade Shapely, using wheels:

pip install -I shapely==1.6b4

The issue affects Rasterio, too. Rasterio version 1.0a9 wheels should be safe with any version of Shapely.

I'll have an announcement about new wheels soon.

Update (2017-10-31): the nightmare is over.