Python Polars 0.18.12

⚠️ Deprecations

• renaming approx_unique as approx_n_unique (#10290)
• Rename first qcut parameter to quantiles (#10253)
• Deprecate avg alias for mean (#10236)

🚀 Performance improvements

• fix O(n^2) in sorted check during append (#10241)

✨ Enhancements

• Add str.extract_groups (#10179)
• raise TypeError for all LazyFrame comparison operators (#10275)
• support bytecode translation to map_dict where the lookup key is an expression (#10265)
• add entry point to the Consortium DataFrame API (#10244)
• Extend datetime expression function with time zone/time unit parameters (#10235)
• add "batch_size" to scan_pyarrow_dataset parameters (#10249)

🐞 Bug fixes

• clear window cache and run windows on proper runners (#10303)
• fix sorted fast path in streaming groupby wrt nulls (#10289)
• Fix interchange protocol allowing copy even when allow_copy was set to False (#10262)
• fix nan aggregation in groupby (#10287)
• don't panic on cse if function hasn't implemented __eq__ (#10286)
• fix empty streaming parquet file (#10252)
• fix logical columns of streaming multi-column sort (#10250)
• fix date/datetime parsing for short inputs with exact=False (#10231)
• don't panic in wildcard apply (#10240)
• fix cse profile (#10239)

🛠️ Other improvements

• Update CODEOWNERS (#10261)
• add note about pyarrow partitioning (#10297)
• Do not keep history in gh-pages branch (#10282)
• make an explicit note in read_parquet and scan_parquet about hive-style partitioning (point to scan_pyarrow_dataset instead) (#10277)
• Fix typo in error message (#10281)
• Replace "question" issues with link to Stack Overflow (#10230)
• Use sphinx' maximum_signature_line_length (#10228)
• add warning about parallel eval of .then(..) branches (#10229)
• Update Sphinx to 7.1.1 and bump related dependencies (#10221)
• Update dependabot config (#10222)

Thank you to all our contributors for making this release possible!
@0xbe7a, @MarcoGorelli, @TLouf, @alexander-beedie, @cmdlineluser, @dependabot, @dependabot[bot], @duvenagep, @mcrumiller, @orlp, @reswqa, @ritchie46 and @stinodego