# NumPy 1.16.2 Release Notes

NumPy 1.16.2 is a quick release fixing several problems encountered on Windows. The Python versions supported are 2.7 and 3.5-3.7. The Windows problems addressed are:

- DLL load problems for NumPy wheels on Windows,

- distutils command line parsing on Windows.

There is also a regression fix correcting signed zeros produced by divmod, see below for details.

Downstream developers building this release should use Cython >= 0.29.2 and, if using OpenBLAS, OpenBLAS > v0.3.4.

If you are installing using pip, you may encounter a problem with older installed versions of NumPy that pip did not delete becoming mixed with the current version, resulting in an `ImportError`. That problem is particularly common on Debian derived distributions due to a modified pip. The fix is to make sure all previous NumPy versions installed by pip have been removed. See #12736 for discussion of the issue.

## Compatibility notes

### Signed zero when using divmod

Starting in version 1.12.0, numpy incorrectly returned a negatively signed zero when using the `divmod` and `floor_divide` functions when the result was zero. For example:

    >>> np.zeros(10)//1
    array([-0., -0., -0., -0., -0., -0., -0., -0., -0., -0.])

With this release, the result is correctly returned as a positively signed zero:

    >>> np.zeros(10)//1
    array([0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0.])

## Contributors

A total of 5 people contributed to this release. People with a “+” by their names contributed a patch for the first time.

- Charles Harris

- Eric Wieser

- Matti Picus

- Tyler Reddy

- Tony LaTorre +

## Pull requests merged

A total of 7 pull requests were merged for this release.

- #12909: TST: fix vmImage dispatch in Azure

- #12923: MAINT: remove complicated test of multiarray import failure mode

- #13020: BUG: fix signed zero behavior in npy_divmod

- #13026: MAINT: Add functions to parse shell-strings in the platform-native…

- #13028: BUG: Fix regression in parsing of F90 and F77 environment variables

- #13038: BUG: parse shell escaping in extra_compile_args and extra_link_args

- #13041: BLD: Windows absolute path DLL loading