astropy + numpy-dev = numpy.char.chararray is deprecated (DeprecationWarning)

[Pey Lian Lim]

To whom it may concern,

You might be affected if you:

• Maintain a Python package that uses both numpy and astropy
• Have CI running a job pulling in numpy-dev (unreleased numpy "nightly" wheel or, gasp, you build numpy from source)
• Turn unhandled warnings into errors in your tests (or just happen to diligently read the logs regardless)

You will see the following warning stemming from astropy.io.fits module:

DeprecationWarning: The chararray class is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Use an ndarray with a string or bytes dtype instead.

We are aware of this and working towards a solution, but currently there is no ETA. So for now, please ignore the warning in your test suite.

Related issues/PRs:

• https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues/3862
• https://github.com/astropy/astropy/issues/19216
• https://github.com/astropy/astropy/pull/19217

We apologize for any inconvenience caused.