issue_comments: 445845065

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/2553#issuecomment-445845065 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/2553 445845065 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDQ0NTg0NTA2NQ== 35968931 2018-12-10T14:59:30Z 2018-12-10T15:21:05Z MEMBER

There are probably some edge cases where the existing auto_combine would you be a little more slopping about how you put together your lists of variables.

I think that's probably the case, but I also think that those edge cases will be so specific that maybe we don't have to explicitly support them. We could just say that anyone who has a combination of datasets that is that funky can just concatenate them themselves?

For users, I think it makes sense to have...

I agree, two separate functions is a lot more intuitive than having auto_combine() behave either auto-magically or totally manually depending on the value of an optional keyword argument.

The only problem with that idea is that both of these functions should be options for open_mfdataset(), so you still have multiple possible argument structures for that function. I think that's okay though - it would be a lot easier to explain if you say "if the keyword argument combine='auto' then the function auto_combine() is used, if combine='manual' then nested_concat_and_merge() is used, and the filepaths must be structured accordingly."

If you like, we could also merge this work (which is excellent progress towards user-facing APIs) but keep the changes internal to xarray for now until we figure out the public APIs.

That would be great. Then I could start using the master branch of xarray again in my code, while we redo the public API. If I set concat_dims back to concat_dim then it should be completely backwards-compatible.

 
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