Rasterio 1.0.15
Rasterio 1.0.15 is on PyPI. It's the first really usable release of the package in 2019. I bungled 1.0.14, so am not counting that one as usable. There is one barely noticeable, but rather big change in the 1.0.15 Python package, and a more noticeable change in the binary wheels that we're publishing for the package.
First of all, the time had come to expand the range of spatial reference
systems supported by Rasterio. Before 1.0.14, the package was strictly tied to
PROJ4 and could not handle spatial reference systems outside of that module
with complete fidelity. Rasterio 1.0.15 has switched to using OGC WKT (version
1) as the canonical representation of spatial reference systems. The Python API
remains the same, but we have higher fidelity and more interoperability. The
one small change in the API is that rasterio.crs.CRS.to_string() may return
a string that looks like PROJCS[blah,blah] or GEOGCS[yada,yada] instead of +proj=utm
... or +proj=latlong .... The result of
rasterio.crs.CRS.from_string(rasterio.crs.CRS.to_string()) hasn't changed, so
I am not counting this as an API change. Don't use microformats in your API's
return values is another lesson, I suppose. A byproduct of this work is that
integration of new features in PROJ versions 5 and 6 will be much easier to
realize in future versions of Rasterio. New features like local and engineering
coordinate systems.
The more major change is that the binary wheels for Linux and OS X that we are publishing to PyPI include GDAL 2.4.0. There are many bug fixes in this release and many new fixtures, some of which I've never tried. I hope that users find this a positive addition. Vincent Sarago showed me how to add HTTP/2 support to libcurl and I have done so for the Linux wheels. I have not done the same for the OS X wheels because I am not sure how to make curl and SSL on OS X completely sound and interoperable with what the fruit vendor ships.
As always, the project is indebted to Even Rouault for help with building, configuring, and debugging GDAL. Rasterio has also enjoyed new help from Alan Snow and Dan Little on spatial referencing and Google Cloud issues.
Share and enjoy.