Shape

------------------

Bug fixes:

- Shapely no longer configures logging in ``geos.py`` (415).

Refactoring:

- Consolidation of exceptions in ``shapely.errors``.
- ``UnsupportedGEOSVersionError`` is raised when GEOS < 3.3.0 (407).

Packaging:

- Added new library search paths to assist Anaconda (413).
- geos-config will now be bypassed when NO_GEOS_CONFIG env var is set. This
allows configuration of Shapely builds on Linux systems that for whatever
reasons do not include the geos-config program (322).

------------------

New features:

- A new error derived from NotImplementedError, with a more useful message, is
raised when the GEOS backend doesn't support a called method (216).
- The ``project()`` method of LineString has been extended to LinearRing
geometries (286).
- A new ``minimum_rotated_rectangle`` attribute has been added to the base
geometry class (354).
- A new ``shapely.ops.polylabel()`` function has been added. It
computes a point suited for labeling concave polygons (395).
- A new ``shapely.ops.split()`` function has been added. It splits a
geometry by another geometry of lesser dimension: polygon by line, line by
point (293, 371).
- ``Polygon.from_bounds()`` constructs a Polygon from bounding coordinates
(392).
- Support for testing with Numpy 1.4.1 has been added (301).
- Support creating all kinds of empty geometries from empty lists of Python
objects (397, 404).

Refactoring:

- Switch from ``SingleSidedBuffer()`` to ``OffsetCurve()`` for GEOS >= 3.3
(270).
- Cython speedups are now enabled by default (252).

Packaging:

- Packaging 16.7, a setup dependency, is vendorized (314).
- Infrastructure for building manylinux1 wheels has been added (391).
- The system's ``geos-config`` program is now only checked when ``setup.py``
is executed, never during normal use of the module (244).
- Added new library search paths to assist PyInstaller (382) and Windows
(343).

-------------------
- Bug fix: eliminate memory leak in geom_factory() (408).
- Bug fix: remove mention of negative distances in parallel_offset and note
that vertices of right hand offset lines are reversed (284).

-------------------
- Bug fix: eliminate memory leak when unpickling geometry objects (384, 385).
- Bug fix: prevent crashes when attempting to pickle a prepared geometry,
raising ``PicklingError`` instead (386).
- Packaging: extension modules in the OS X wheels uploaded to PyPI link only
libgeos_c.dylib now (you can verify and compare to previous releases with
``otool -L shapely/vectorized/_vectorized.so``).

-------------------
- Bug fix: use uintptr_t to store pointers instead of long in _geos.pxi,
preventing an overflow error (372, 373). Note that this bug fix was
erroneously reported to have been made in 1.5.14, but was not.

-------------------
- Bug fix: use ``type()`` instead of ``isinstance()`` when evaluating geometry
equality, preventing instances of base and derived classes from
being mistaken for equals (317).
- Bug fix: ensure that empty geometries are created when constructors have no
args (332, 333).
- Bug fix: support app "freezing" better on Windows by not relying on the
``__file__`` attribute (342, 377).
- Bug fix: ensure that empty polygons evaluate to be ``==`` (355).
- Bug fix: filter out empty geometries that can cause segfaults when creating
and loading STRtrees (345, 348).
- Bug fix: no longer attempt to reuse GEOS DLLs already loaded by Rasterio
or Fiona on OS X (374, 375).