Polars: py-0.15.16 Release

🚀 Performance improvements

• Improve rechunk check (#6268)
• reuse allocated scratches in ipc writer (#6287)
• use dedicated writer thread for sink_parquet (#6285)

✨ Enhancements

• add strict parameter to decoding expressions (#6342)
• allow unordered struct creating from anyvalues (#6321)
• allow pass_name in aggregation apply (#6318)
• parse abbrev month name (#6314)
• Add warning for new behaviour of named rows (#6300)
• add dt.combine for combining date and time components (#6121)
• improvements to dtype-based column selection (#6295)
• add sink_ipc (#6286)
• additional schema_overrides param for more ergonomic DataFrame init (#6230)

🐞 Bug fixes

• don't cast nulls before trying normal cast (#6339)
• properly dispatch categorical string comparison (#6336)
• expand all nested wildcards in functions (#6334)
• fix groupby rolling by_key if groups are empty (#6333)
• Fix some type hints and bugs for groupby (#6329)
• Reject None input for head/tail (#6326)
• parse abbrev month name (#6314)
• default to pyarrow for writing parquet (#6313)
• disallow alias in inline join expressions (#6312)
• block proj-pd and pred-pd on swapping rename (#6303)
• convert nested dictionary with i64 keys (#6299)
• fix(python) Print instantiated dtypes in glimpse (#6298)
• infer y-m-d datetime even if single element (#6297)
• fix panic dynamic_groupby on empty dataframe (#6294)
• implement missing DataFrame __floordiv__ op (#6280)
• Allow low and high in date_range to be str (#6275)
• allow integer-compatible row indexes that are not strictly typed as int (#6266)
• Parse negative dates with polars parser (#6256)

🛠️ Other improvements

• run cse optimization only if joins and caches… (#6337)
• Fix wrong description for variable_name argument in melt (#6331)
• Fix random groupby test failure (#6327)
• fixup test names, adjust test_struct (#6317)
• simplify _from_pandas constructor (#6310)
• Ignore hash doctests (#6304)
• Fix docstring formatting for truncate (#6291)
• Move package metadata to pyproject.toml (#6271)
• Move io tests to the same folder (#6277)
• Enable Dependabot (#5036)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @MarcoGorelli, @alexander-beedie, @c-peters, @dependabot, @dependabot[bot], @ghuls, @n8henrie, @ritchie46, @stinodego and @universalmind303