Getting ready for release 3.4.0

Author: Luke Shaw

ANNOUNCE.rst

@@ -1,11 +1,7 @@
-Announcing Python-Blosc2 3.3.4
+Announcing Python-Blosc2 3.4.0
 ==============================
 
-This is a bugfix release, with some minor optimizations. We further improved the
-correct chaining of *string* lazy expressions (to allow operands with more
-diverse data types). In addition, both indexing and where expressions are now
-supported within *string* lazy expressions. Finally, casting rules have
-been improved to be more consistent with NumPy.
+This release adds significant new functionality in the form of ``concatenate``. We support general concatenation of ndarrays, and offer an optimised path with significant speedups for the case of concatenating arrays with compatible chunk and blockshapes. In addition, there are bug fixes and more functionality for slicing of lazyexprs, and the possibility to jit compile user-defined functions which operate on pandas objects using the blosc2 engine.
 
 You can think of Python-Blosc2 3.x as an extension of NumPy/numexpr that:
 

RELEASE_NOTES.md

@@ -1,9 +1,21 @@
 # Release notes
-
-## Changes from 3.3.4 to 3.3.5
+## Changes from 3.4.0 to 3.4.1
 
 XXX version-specific blurb XXX
 
+## Changes from 3.3.4 to 3.4.0
+
+* Added C-level ``concatenate`` function in response to community request. When possible, uses an optimised path which avoids decompression and recompression, giving a significant performance boost. See PR #423.
+
+* Slicing has been added to string-based lazyexprs, so that one may use
+  expressions like `expr[1:3] +1` to compute a slice of the expression. This is useful
+  for getting a sub-expression of a larger expression, and it works with both
+  string-based and lazy expressions. See PR #417.
+
+* Relatedly, the behaviour of the `slice` parameter in the `compute()` method of `LazyExpr` has been made more consistent and is now better documented, so that results are as expected. See PR #419.
+
+* UDF support for pandas has been added to allow for the use of ``blosc2.jit``. See PR #418. Thanks to [@datapythonista](https://github.com/datapythonista) for the implementation!
+
 ## Changes from 3.3.3 to 3.3.4
 
 * Expand possibilities for chaining string-based lazy expressions to incorporate

pyproject.toml

@@ -41,7 +41,7 @@ dependencies = [
     "py-cpuinfo; platform_machine != 'wasm32'",
     "requests",
 ]
-version = "3.3.5.dev0"
+version = "3.4.0"
 
 
 [project.optional-dependencies]

src/blosc2/version.py

@@ -1 +1 @@
-__version__ = "3.3.5.dev0"
+__version__ = "3.4.0"