issue_comments: 483331668

A few comments:

1) You need to have separately managed repos as you don't want the natural limits of group organization to bottleneck and limit the growth of the ecosystem (there is a reason SciPy broke-up into scikits --- and it hasn't gone far enough)

2) xarray should reify its API as soon as possible and own it (you may be too late to pull-back on ill-advised APIs already).

3) A simple list like awesome xarray in a Github repo that is referenced by xarray docs goes a long way towards a discoverable set of packages and helping people find each other. A namespace like xscipy would also work (but see next comment).

4) We are working on producing scipy-like libraries that can work on arbitrary arrays (we call this informally uscipy). Perhaps uscipy and xscipy can join forces and define interfaces that assume labels may exist.

5) xarray can be a nice intermediate between up-stream scipy-like libraries, and implementation details like NumPy or xnd (or even dask). I'm quite sure that xarray could be backed by the low-level libraries in xnd (and it is a goal of xnd to support projects like xarray).

6) Long term, we at Quansight Labs are working on getting an array protocol into Python core itself. I suspect we should get labels put into that definition from the beginning, and will need feedback from this community to make that happen. Timing for this is a PEP by end of 2019. If someone is eager to work on this now, it could go faster.