v0.7.2

v0.7.2 (May 19, 2026)

New Checks

Improvements

• Made hdmf-zarr an optional dependency to restore pip-installability when numcodecs wheels are unavailable. Install with pip install nwbinspector[zarr] to enable Zarr-backed NWB file inspection. The local-file read path now delegates to pynwb.read_nwb, which produces a clear install hint when a Zarr file is encountered without the [zarr] extra. #698
• Reorganized CI so upstream-dev test failures no longer gate PRs. Dev-branch jobs (test-pynwb-dev, test-dandi-dev, test-dandi-dev-live) moved from deploy-tests.yml into a new dev-dailies.yml scheduled workflow. Also added per-workflow failure emails, centralized the testing.yml Python and OS matrices into shared text files, renamed dev-gallery.yml to pynwb-dev-tests.yml, and rewrote read-nwbfile-tests.yml to use a named conda environment (environment-ros3.yml) so the ROS3-enabled h5py from conda-forge activates correctly on Windows runners. #700

Fixes

• Fixed ROS3 streaming in read_nwbfile after h5py began enforcing an explicit aws_region for the ROS3 driver. Added a backend_kwargs keyword-only parameter to read_nwbfile that forwards arbitrary kwargs to the underlying NWBHDF5IO constructor on the streaming paths (fsspec, ros3); ROS3 callers now pass backend_kwargs={"aws_region": "us-east-1"}. The generic escape hatch avoids having to surface each new upstream kwarg individually. #700
• Deprecated read_nwbfile_and_io; it will be removed after 2026-11-13. Use read_nwbfile instead; the IO object is accessible from the returned NWBFile via nwbfile.get_read_io(). #700