[Community] Rtree 0.5.0 released

[Howard Butler]

All,

I am pleased to announce the release of Rtree 0.5.0.  Rtree 0.5.0 is  
the first release of a complete refactoring of the library, and it  
requires libspatialindex 1.4.0 or greater for operation.  The new code  
represents a significant leap forward in capabilities, flexibility,  
and performance.  Although my opinion is that I have tested it as well  
as the 0.4 code was tested (including full valgrinding to clean up  
leaks in both Rtree and libspatialindex), you should give things a  
good test before putting it in production.  The new code should have  
API parity with the old in addition to the new features and performance.

The highlights include:

- ability to bulk load an index from a generator at instantiation time
- multidimensional indexes (2, 3, 4, ..., kD).
- ability to store pickles when inserting index items and retrieve  
them in queries
- custom index/dat filenames!
- tunable index performance with index properties (see libspatialindex  
documentation)
- quick index bounds query
- fetchable index item bounds (when using objects=True in your nearest/ 
intersection calls)
- point storage where applicable (minx==max && miny == maxy && ... &&  
mink == maxk)

<http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Rtree/>

This code represents where I wanted to see the library go when I  
started working on it with Sean.  The index properties stuff will  
allow a tweaker to play with the indexing parameters to their heart's  
content, and the snazzy stuff like the bulk loading generator stuff  
will allow a Python user to take advantage of advanced capabilities of  
the library with ease.  There's still plenty of work left to do, but  
this is a good hop down the road.

Howard

PS, of course I find an issue with libspatialindex on msvc 2003 when  
doing the final packaging.  No windows builds for 2.4/2.5 right now,  
but I hope to have them up soon.  2.6 is available, however.