issue_comments: 935683056

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/5202#issuecomment-935683056 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/5202 935683056 IC_kwDOAMm_X843xWPw 4160723 2021-10-06T07:50:59Z 2021-10-06T07:50:59Z MEMBER

From https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/5692#issuecomment-925718593:

One change is that a multi-index is not always created with stack. It is created only if each of the dimensions to stack together have one and only one coordinate with a pandas index (this could be a non-dimension coordinate).

This could maybe address #5202, since we could simply drop the indexes before stacking the dimensions in order to avoid the creation of a multi-index. I don't think it's a big breaking change either unless there are users who rely on default multi-indexes with range (0, 1, 2...) levels. Looking at #5202, however, those default multi-indexes seem more problematic than something really useful, but I might be wrong here. Also, range-based indexes can still be created explicitly before stacking the dimensions if needed.

Another consequence is that stack is not always reversible, since unstack still requires a pandas multi-index (one and only one multi-index per dimension to unstack).

cc @pydata/xarray as this is an improvement regarding this issue but also a sensible change. To ensure a smoother transition we could maybe add a create_index option to stack which accepts these values:

  • True: always create a multi-index
  • False: never create a multi-index
  • None: create a multi-index only if we can unambiguously pick one index for each of the dimensions to stack

We can default to True now to avoid breaking changes and maybe later default to None. If we eventually add support for custom (non-pandas backed) indexes, we could also allow passing an xarray.Index class.

 
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