Rasterio 1.1.0

After 28 post-1.0 bug fix releases, Rasterio finally has a 1.1.0 release with new features: https://pypi.org/project/rasterio/1.1.0/. The changes are listed here: https://github.com/mapbox/rasterio/blob/master/CHANGES.txt#L9-L68. I had fun collaborating with Vincent Sarago on the design and implementation of transform.from_gcps(). I miss working with Vincent, it's been hard getting by without him on my team.

Rasterio has 90 authors now, including new authors Andrew Annex, Caleb Robinson, Christoph Rieke, Darren Weber, Denis Rykov, Guillaume Lostis, Ismail Sunni, Jennifer Reiber Kyle, Koshy Thomas, Leah Wasser, Lukasz, Martin Raspaud, Pablo Sanfilippo, RK Aranas, Raaj Tilak Sarma, Robert Sare, Yuvi Panda, appanacca, derekjanni, firas omrane, jaredairbusaerial, and sshuair.

I'm very pleased about two of the bug fixes in 1.1.0. I blogged recently about fixing some memory leaks; that's one of them. The other bug fix involved GDAL dataset reference counting. I finally got a really good grip on this. In 1.1.0, closing a DatasetReader doesn't automatically destroy the underlying GDAL dataset handle, it decrements the handle's reference count and destroys it only when the count reaches zero. This means that the handle will be kept alive through the lifetime of a VRT object based on the DatasetReader. A fun thing about writing Python extension modules with GDAL is that I get to deal with two reference counting implementations: Python's and GDAL's, as well as two implementations of exceptions: Python's and GDAL's. I started a blog post on these topics a while ago, but it stalled out. I should try to finish it some day.