News

Release of v0.3.0

Version 0.3.0 will be released in February 2021. This will be a major release introducing major improvements to the package.

A new method assign is now available for generating new variables. This replaces the mutate and transmute, which were place-holder functions in the early releases of nctoolkit until a proper method for creating variables was put in place. assign operates in the same way as the assign method in Pandas. Users can generate new variables using lambda functions.

A major-change in this release is that evaluation is now lazy by default. The previous default of non-lazy evaluation was designed to make life slightly easier for new users of the package, but it is probably overly annoying for users to have to set evaluation to lazy each time they use the package.

This release features a subtle shift in how datasets work, so that they have consistent list-like properties. Previously, the files in a dataset given by the `current` attribute could be both a str or a list, depending on whether there was one or more files in the dataset. This now always gives a list. As a result datasets in nctoolkit have list-like properties, with `append and remove methods available for adding and removing files. remove is a new method in this release. As before datasets are iterable.

This release will also allow users to run nctoolkit in parallel. Previous releases allowed files in multi-file datasets to be processed in parallel. However, it was not possible to create processing chains and process files in parallel. This is now possible in version thanks to under-the-hood changes in nctoolkit’s code base.

Users are now able to add a configuration file, which means global settings do not need to be set in every session or in every script.