issue_comments: 410068839

For the user base I think if we can cover as many groups as possible that would be best. I know there are plenty of people who need to describe CRS information in their data, but don't use geotiffs and therefore don't really need rasterio/gdal. The group I immediately thought of was the metpy group which is why I talked to @dopplershift in the first place. The immediate need for this group (based on his scipy talk) will be people reading NetCDF files and putting the data on a cartopy plot. I think @dopplershift and I agreed that when it comes problems building/distributing software dealing with this type of data the cause is almost always gdal/libgdal. I'm in favor of making it optional if possible.

For the to_netcdf stuff I think anything that needs to be "adjusted" before writing to a NetCDF file can be handled by required users to call my_data.geo.to_netcdf(...). I'm not a huge fan of the accessor adding information automatically that the user didn't specifically request. Side effects on your data just for importing a module is not good. I will try to put together a package skeleton and lay out some of the stuff in my head in the next month, but am still catching up on work after SciPy and a week of vacation so not sure when exactly I'll get to it.

I just did a search for "geoxarray" on github and @wy2136's repositories came up where they are importing a geoxarray package. @wy2136, is there another geoxarray project that we are not aware of? Do you have anything else to add to this discussion?