Python Polars 0.17.11

🚀 Performance improvements

• improve nested grouptuples related code (#8618)
• buffer spill partitions in ooc sort. ~10/20% (#8616)
• avoid potentially redundant casts on Series init (#8613)

✨ Enhancements

• add Expr.meta namespace eq and ne methods (#8599)
• avoid potentially redundant casts on Series init (#8613)
• use temp dir for ooc spills (#8614)
• add strict dtype equality comparison methods (is_ and is_not) (#8600)
• automatically convert series <op> expr to pl.lit(series) <op> expr (#8549)

🐞 Bug fixes

• maintain sorted info on top-k and empty sort (#8615)
• fix ooc sort regression; don't take IO-thread before init (#8607)
• maintain sortedness in date -> datetime cast (#8606)

🛠️ Other improvements

• document sortedness of return value of upsample (#8612)
• Set up functions module in Rust bindings (#8598)
• Split PyExpr impl block into modules (#8596)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible!
@MarcoGorelli, @alexander-beedie, @dependabot, @dependabot[bot], @mcrumiller, @ritchie46 and @stinodego