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intake / intake-xarray

Intake plugin for xarray
https://intake-xarray.readthedocs.io/
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
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Could netcdf4 be pulled out to isolate GPL code? #41

Open danielballan opened 5 years ago

danielballan commented 5 years ago

I think netcdf4 is inflected with GPL code. I'm wondering if it could be made an optional dependency of intake-xarray, or moved into a separate intake-netcdf4 package.

Although conda-forge reports that netcdf4 has an MIT liencse, netcdf4 has a hard dependency on cftime which has a GPL license.

h/t @dylanmcreynolds who noticed this problem.

danielballan commented 5 years ago

To be clear, I would be happy to do the work to make this happen if the maintainers of this package support the change.

martindurant commented 5 years ago

It would be ok by me to have this only as an optional dependency, but, of course, the docs had better be clear (and good error message on import failure).

jsignell commented 5 years ago

Yeah I am consistently surprised by the dependency on netcdf4. xarray doesn't depend on netcdf4, so we can probably look there for good error messaging.

andersy005 commented 3 years ago

It's my understanding that the license inccompatibility issue in netcdf4-ptyhon/cftime got fixed a few days ago: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf4-python/issues/1073.

jsignell commented 3 years ago

Seems like the conscensus here is that it would be fine to remove the xarray dep, but I'm not sure whether there is any motivation for doing that if the license issue is resolved.