issue_comments: 1264386173

I'm a little torn on this. Obviously I'm not an xarray maintainer so I'm not the one who would have to maintain it or answer support questions about it. We actually had the user-side of this discussion in the Satpy library group a while ago which is leading to this whole problem for us now. In Satpy we don't typically use or deal with xarray Datasets (the new DataTree library is likely what we'll move to) so when we have relationships between DataArrays we'll use something like ancillary variables to connect them. For example, a data quality flag that is used by the other variables in a file. Our users don't usually care about the DQF but we don't want to stop them from being able to easily access it. I was never a huge fan of putting a DataArray in the attrs of another DataArray, but nothing seemed to disallow it so I ultimately lost that argument.

So on one hand I agree it seems like there shouldn't be a need in most cases to have a DataArray inside a DataArray, especially a circular dependency. On the other hand, I'm not looking forward to the updates I'll need to make to Satpy to fix this. Note, we don't do this everywhere in Satpy, just something we use for a few formats we read.