Awkward 2.1.0 (targeting February 1, 2023) will require NumPy >= 1.17.0

[jpivarski]

This is a heads-up that NumPy 1.17.0 or later will soon be required. That's a version of NumPy that was released on July 26, 2019, so you're probably already using it. According to NEP 29, it's already obsolete.

This NumPy version provides some features that we have work-arounds for at the moment. We'll be able to remove those work-arounds. As a user-visible change, the equivalence of ak.XYZ and np.XYZ for functions XYZ that exist in both libraries is made possible by NumPy 1.17.0.

This new minimum version will go into effect in Awkward 2.1.0, which will be approximately February 1, 2022. Here is a table of upcoming deprecations. The NumPy deprecation is the only backward incompatible change in Awkward 2.1.0.

See #2138 (comment) for how this came up.