1.7a1 release

[sgillies]

I went through issues on the 1.7 milestone and bumped the ones that were making no progress down the road. @snorfalorpagus do I have your approval for a 1.7a1 release around Feb 1? Is there anything you'd like to add to the 1.7 milestone?

[jtschoonhoven]

Can you please include 698e206 in the next release? We've been seeing issues due to that bug for a while.

[sgillies]

@jtschoonhoven Yes indeed! I'm going to cherry pick it for the next 1.6 release as well, which I thought I had done (see https://github.com/Toblerity/Shapely/blob/master/CHANGES.txt#L32), but actually failed to do 😦

See #559.

[michaelaye]

looks like the PyPI history needs an update to the year counter? Has 1.6.4 as a 2017 release?

[sgillies]

@michaelaye thanks for pointing this out. I've fixed it!

The 1.7 pre-release is delayed due to travel and sickness on my part this month, let's reschedule for Mar 1.

[sgillies]

1.7a1 is tagged and distributions have been uploaded to PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/Shapely/1.7a1/#files.