2.8.0-rc.1

This is a multi-tagging of 2.8.0-dev.5 for the purpose of indicating that this release is slated to become 2.8.0 after a bit of testing.

Changes since 2.7.0

Minor Version Features

• Added a deserializer kwarg to consumer components to facilitate unicode support
• Added a reset_offset_on_fetch kwarg to consumer components to support read-only
  consumption
• Changed the expected type of the consumer's consumer_group kwarg to str from bytes
• Changed the expected type of TopicDict.__getitem__'s parameter to str from bytes
• Added a pending_timeout_ms kwarg to Producer.__init__ to allow delivery report
  wait timeouts
• Added a serializer kwarg to Producer.__init__ to facilitate unicode support
• Deprecated the generation_id and consumer_id parameters on SimpleConsumer
• Added a partition_offsets kwarg to consumers' commit_offsets method to decouple
  the notions of "committed" vs "consumed" messages
• Added an attempts kwarg to Broker.connect that controls retries during broker
  connection
• Added a queue_empty_timeout_ms kwarg to Producer.__init__ that creates an "empty
  wait" state in the Producer when no messages are available to produce
• Added the zookeeper_hosts kwarg to BalancedConsumer to standardize kwarg naming
• Implemented versioning for ListOffsetRequest
• Changed the behavior of integer arguments passed to reset_offsets

Bugfixes

• Changed consumers to handle valid ascii strings for consumer group names instead of
  bytes
• Handled NoNodeException during consumer ZK node releases
• Used api_versions to select the version-appropriate implementation for
  OffsetFetchRequest
• Adjusted synchronous production logic to avoid infinite blocking when delivery report
  is lost
• Fixed a bug in FetchResponseV1 causing throttle_time to be returned as a tuple
  instead of an integer
• Implemented support for all current versions of OffsetFetchRequest and
  OffsetFetchResponse
• Updated some cli.print_managed_consumer_groups to be Py3 compatible
• Updated the topic creation/deletion CLI to avoid trying to talk to 0.10.0 brokers
• Improved error handling in Cluster.get_group_coordinator
• Added retry logic to BrokerConnection.connect
• Handled some nuisance errors when shutting down in handlers.py
• Added a threading.Event instance to Producer indicating the presence of at least
  one message in the queue to enable nonbusy "empty waiting"
• Added logic to SimpleConsumer.commit_offsets and
  OwnedPartition.build_offset_commit_request that handles user-specified offset
  information and sends it in requests
• Fixed the internal logic of reset_offsets to be more predictable and user-friendly,
  and to better handle the case where the topic has a single log segment
• Standardized the handling of offsets_before arguments across the API
• Added cluster update attempts to produce() retries
• Added a more descriptive error message on certain broker version mismatch errors

Miscellaneous

• Used logging.NullHandler to remove nuisance logs
• Added stock unicode serde to utils
• Added README to pypi info
• Updated version of Kafka used in Travis tests to 1.0.1
• Added usage guide section on connection loss
• Updated test harness to allow simulated killing of brokers
• Added a giant explanatory docstring to Topic.fetch_offset_limits clarifying how the
  ListOffsets API works
• Pinned gevent dependency to avoid breaking change in kazoo, which depends on it
• Added tests for retrying broker connections
• Added tests for user-specified offset commits
• Added usage example on consuming the last N messages from a topic
• Deprecated the zookeeper_connect kwarg on BalancedConsumer
• Split the protocol.py file into multiple smaller files via the protocol module
• Changed the lag monitor CLI to avoid resetting offsets
• Added InvalidTopic to the list of supported exceptions
• Updated requirement versions: lz4, pytest, xxhash
• Removed hacky test-skipping logic from test suite
• xfail test_update_cluster, since it occasionally fails