Numpy 2.x+ compatibility

[Zethson]

Description of feature

Hi,

the CI and therefore users currently install numpy 1.26 because https://github.com/eyurtsev/fcsparser is not numpy 2.0.0 compatible and therefore readfcs isn't either.

What is the longterm plan here? https://github.com/eyurtsev/fcsparser is not maintained anymore according to the numpy 2.0.0 issue

[grst]

Maybe this is a reason to switch to @whitews's FlowIO?

There has been a lengthy discussion in #47 about even moving flowutils to scverse, but it became stale at some point.

[whitews]

Hi Gregor and Lukas,

FlowIO is an essential dependency of FlowKit and as such is actively maintained. I've been tempted to add NumPy as a dependency to FlowIO but felt it was best to leave it with zero dependencies for situations like this. It's purpose is to read and write FCS files and that's what it does.

If you all do choose to use FlowIO, I'd point out one caveat. Since it reads the event data exactly as it is stored in the FCS file, any gain defined by a channel (in the metadata) is not applied. This pre-processing is rather straight-forward to implement and an example of doing so can be found in the FlowKit Sample class constructor. Or, you could just use FlowKit to get this functionality of the Sample class, the transforms implemented in FlowUtils and other features.

Hope this helps,
Scott