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deprecate open_rasterio in favour of a rioxarray entrypoint? #4697
Description
Now that our backends work is well underway, it seems like a good time to discuss deprecating the open_rasterio function and outsourcing it to rioxarray (which would then implement support for the new entrypoint).
There's also the question of where the rasterio backend should live once #1970 is implemented. I think we can make a pretty strong argument that it should move out of xarray and into a 3rd party package. Perhaps rasterio itself, or, more likely something like rio-xarray (cc @snowman2). See #3166 for a demo of how this may work.
As you can see, there are a few big questions up in the air right now. Work on #1970 will begin this summer so now is a great time to game out the various options for the rasterio backend.
I am in favour of doing this. I see no reason why there should be two slightly divergent versions of the same function, and (anecdotally) the rioxarray version seems to be more full-featured and regularly improved.
@pydata/xarray What do you think?
If we agree to do this (and rioxarray agrees), we could put this as a "deliverable" in our NASA proposal. This work would be totally relevant to that call.
Related: #4142
Activity
snowman2 commentedon Dec 16, 2020
Looks like entrypoint support was added in #4577. What is the timeline for the next release?
Is
rioxarrayagreeing to allow the addition of entrypoint support? If so, 👍keewis commentedon Dec 19, 2020
There's no timeline, yet. Since we just released
0.16.2, maybe in about 2-3 months?snowman2 commentedon Apr 19, 2021
@alexamici added the entrypoint here; vylor/rioxarray#281. It seems xarray 0.18+ is required for it to work. Any timeline for the
0.18release?max-sixty commentedon Apr 19, 2021
I think we could release 0.17.1 fairly soon — nothing is pending but it's also fairly easy to do a release.
Do we want to deprecate
open_rasterioand point people towardsrioxarray? We can do that now.alexamici commentedon Apr 19, 2021
@max-sixty I'm +1 on deprecating xarray flavour of
open_rasterioand direct users torioxarray.BTW, I would rather prefer the next release to be
0.18.0as the backend changes are both large and user visible (open_datasetnow accept**kwargsthat are added to**backend_kwargs).max-sixty commentedon Apr 19, 2021
OK great @alexamici
keewis commentedon May 27, 2021
if we deprecate
xr.open_rasteriowe should also do the same forxr.tutorial.open_rasterioand getxr.tutorial.open_dataset("RGB.byte")to work.keewis commentedon Jun 18, 2021
Since it comes up pretty often: should we go through with deprecating
open_rasterioand the builtinrasteriobackend?