Polars: py-0.16.17 Release

🚀 Performance improvements

• use streaming instead of partitioned groupby (#7907)
• don't auto-stream groupby (#7906)
• rechunk before aggs (#7903)
• don't re-allocate groups in sorted to_dummies (#7897)
• fix hashing regression (#7833)
• rechunk dataframe before unique computation (#7814)
• improve hash quality (#7813)
• always take sorted fast path group_tuples (#7787)

✨ Enhancements

• auto-infer detecting time-zone-awareness of fmt argument in strptime; deprecate tz_aware argument (#7886)
• Add Series.pow() (#7898)
• deal with null values in cut/qcut (#7878)
• allow list/tuple lit values (#7879)
• Support writing dynamic/live formula columns via write_excel (#7871)
• support datetime/date subclasses (e.g. FreezeGun) (#7819)
• support mode for floats and categoricals (#7827)
• allow Series init with Unknown dtype to proceed as if dtype is None, to allow inference (#7830)
• support sort by 'struct' type (#7822)
• add to_repr methods to DataFrame and Series (#7802)
• thousand separators in shape of repr DataFrame (#7775)
• Improve automatic output dtype setting for map_dict. (#7797)
• new utility from_repr function that reconstructs a DataFrame from its table repr (#7781)
• deprecate default value of aggregation_function being 'first' in pivot. In a future version, it will default to None (#7784)

🐞 Bug fixes

• fix lit agg (#7904)
• disable ooc groupby (#7901)
• Use check_exact for temporal types in assert_series_equal (#7896)
• fix abs logical type (#7895)
• fix boolean min/max output type and null handling (#7894)
• Cast compound types to their simple string representation on export to Excel (#7887)
• ensure _repr_html_ escapes column names in addition to data/body elements (#7877)
• validate groupby_dynamic inputs (#7876)
• correct for chunks in arg_where (#7873)
• fix nested logical/physical list (#7872)
• fix arbitrary nested logical types (#7869)
• Relax type hints for when/then (#7857)
• don't use fxhash in sink_sorted fast path (#7849)
• parquet stats & all kernel (#7846)
• Add missing type hint for is_between (#7835)
• fill null list (#7836)
• fix explode listnull
• fix unicode lower/uppercase (#7826)
• raise error on invalid series concat strategy (#7823)
• don't use naive name in partitioned agg (#7810)
• Ensure CsvReader always respects the n_rows parameter (#7789)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Fix read_csv docstring formatting (#7875)
• update concat docstring for how parameter (#7834)
• don't run hash stability test on arm64 (#7825)
• Improve pl.when documentation (#7793)
• add description of ddof (#7811)
• Rename venv folder to .venv (#7790)
• add a make requirements option to install/refresh dependencies without having to recreate the venv (#7792)
• fixup stacklevels (#7796)
• Drop ruff target version (#7791)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @LdRoW, @MarcoGorelli, @Newtoniano, @advoet, @alexander-beedie, @duskmoon314, @foxcroftjn, @ghuls, @jonashaag, @ritchie46, @stinodego and @zundertj