Awkward

Fixed 628, allowing `np.int64(N)` to be used in a slice like integer `N` (PR 636).

The intent is for this to be the last prerelease before 1.0.2. Test it!

Added the ability to select fields inside of nested records with syntax like `array[["pt", "eta", "phi"], "nominal"]` (619).

Fixed Apache Arrow → Awkward Array (`ak.from_arrow`) for sliced Arrow arrays: it has an `offset` attribute we had been ignoring (625). Thanks to trickarcher for the extensive tests!

Ensured that an `ak.Array`'s `behavior` always gets passed to output of any operation (626), even if the input is a dict (627, affected `ak.zip`, `ak.cartesian`, and `ak.argcartesian`).

Fixed 629, `ak.with_field` dropping parameters (631), and 634, `ak.fill_none` not accepting a Record as a fill value (635).

Added a roadmap and upvote/thumbs up instructions to the README.

jpivarski revised the `ak.concatenate` implementation (610), fixed a bug related to `axis` handling (612), and made `ak.concatenate` friendlier to lazy arrays (613; "friendlier" = "materializes arrays in fewer cases").

chrisburr added `setuptools` as a requirement because it is used for `pkg_resources`.

ianna added validity-checking for strings, bytestrings, and categorical (571), including some revisions of sorting and a partial implementation of checking for uniqueness and identifying unique elements from arrays that can later be used to implement `np.unique`.

This release is only for getting a Zenodo DOI for this repo.

Updated Awkward <--> Arrow conversion to preserve nullability in type (PRs 602, 606). Preemptively avoiding warnings from NumPy 1.20 (599) and fixed 32-bit Linux cases in the tests (604).

henryiii fixed hardcoded threads in MacOS compilation target (for deploying to conda-forge).

Fixed 597 with PR 598. Otherwise identical to 1.0.1rc3.