Polars: py-0.19.12 Release

⚠️ Deprecations

• Deprecate nans_compare_equal parameter in assert utils (#12019)
• Rename ljust/rjust to pad_end/pad_start (#11975)
• Deprecate shift_and_fill in favor of shift (#11955)
• Deprecate clip_min/clip_max in favor of clip (#11961)

🚀 Performance improvements

• improve parquet downloading (#12061)
• fix regression non-null asof join (#11984)
• drasticly improve performance of limit on async parquet datasets (#11965)

✨ Enhancements

• Add supertype for List/Array (#12016)
• enable eq and neq for array dtype (#12020)
• Expressify n of shift (#12004)
• add dedicated name namespace for operations that affect expression names (#11973)
• optimize asof_join and allow null/string keys (#11712)
• limit concurrent downloads in async parquet (#11971)
• sample fraction can take an expr (#11943)
• Add infer_schema_length to pl.read_json (#11724)

🐞 Bug fixes

• Fix get_index/iteration for Array types (#12047)
• improved xlsx2csv defaults for read_excel (#12081)
• str.concat on empty list (#12066)
• fix issue with invalid Mapping objects used as schema being silently ignored (#12027)
• improve ingest from numpy scalar values (#12025)
• binary agg should group aware if literal not a scalar (#12043)
• Use Arrow schema for file readers (#12048)
• Error on duplicates in hive partitioning (#12040)
• display fmt for str split (#12039)
• sum_horizontal should not always cast to int (#12031)
• fix apply_to_inner's dtype (#12010)
• Allow inexact checking of nested integers (#12037)
• Fix padding for non-ASCII strings (#12008)
• fix dot visualization of anonymous scans (#12002)
• SQL table aliases (#11988)
• fix streaming multi-column/multi-dtype sort (#11981)
• ensure streaming parquet datasets deal with limits (#11977)
• implement proper hash for identifier in cse (#11960)
• fix take return dtype in group context. (#11949)
• fix panic in format of anonymous scans (#11951)
• sql In should work without specific ops (#11947)
• construct list series from any values subject to dtype (#11944)

🛠️ Other improvements

• minor updates to lint-related dependencies (#12073)
• Add Excel page to user guide (#12055)
• Direct CONTRIBUTING to the docs website (#12042)
• Replace black by ruff format (#11996)
• Further assert utils refactor (#12015)
• Remove stacklevels checker utility script (#11962)
• Disable type checking for dataframe_api_compat dependency (#11997)
• Fix release tag (#11994)
• optimize asof_join and allow null/string keys (#11712)
• Add Development and Releases sections to the documentation (#11932)
• include the "build" dir when running make clean for docs (#11970)
• make cloning PyExpr consistent (#11956)
• fix take return dtype in group context. (#11949)
• warn about scan_pyarrow_dataset's limitations and suggest scan_parquet instead (if possible) (#11952)
• Add set_fmt_table_cell_list_len to API docs (#11942)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible! @JulianCologne, @MarcoGorelli, @Rohxn16, @alexander-beedie, @braaannigan, @brayanjuls, @messense, @nameexhaustion, @orlp, @reswqa, @ritchie46, @squnit, @stinodego and @universalmind303