id,node_id,number,title,user,state,locked,assignee,milestone,comments,created_at,updated_at,closed_at,author_association,active_lock_reason,draft,pull_request,body,reactions,performed_via_github_app,state_reason,repo,type
587895591,MDU6SXNzdWU1ODc4OTU1OTE=,3891,Keep attrs by default? (keep_attrs),5635139,open,0,,,14,2020-03-25T18:17:35Z,2023-09-22T02:27:50Z,,MEMBER,,,,"<!-- A short summary of the issue, if appropriate -->

I've held this view in low confidence for a while and wanted to socialize it to see whether there's something to it: Should we keep attrs in operations by default? 

Advantages:
- I think most of the time people want to keep attrs after operations
    - Is that right? Are there cases where it wouldn't be a reasonable default? e.g. good points [here](https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/688#issuecomment-167832185) for not always keeping _coords_ around
- It's easy to remove them with a (currently unimplemented) `drop_attrs` method when people do want to remove them

Disadvantages:
- Backward incompatible change with an expensive deprecate cycle (would be impractical to have a deprecation warning every time someone ran a function on an object with attrs I think? At least without adding a `once` filter warning)
- ?

Here are some existing relevant discussions:
- https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/3815#issuecomment-603974527
- https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/688
- https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/2482
- https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/3304

I think this is an easy situation to get into:
- We make an incorrect-but-insignificant design decision; e.g. some methods don't keep attrs 
- We want to change that, but avoid breaking backward-compatibility
- So we add kwargs and eventually a global config
- But now we have a global config that requires global context and lots of kwargs! :(

I'm up for leaning towards breaking changes if it makes the library better: I think xarray will grow immensely, and so the narrow immediate pain is worth the broader future positive impact. Clearly if the immediate pain stops xarray growing, then it's not a good tradeoff.","{""url"": ""https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/3891/reactions"", ""total_count"": 0, ""+1"": 0, ""-1"": 0, ""laugh"": 0, ""hooray"": 0, ""confused"": 0, ""heart"": 0, ""rocket"": 0, ""eyes"": 0}",,,13221727,issue