Revamp at STAC sprint

[jsignell]

I still think intake-stac serves an interesting role. Intake is domain-agnostic and python-specific whereas STAC is geo-specific and language-agnostic. So it is totally reasonable that someone might be more comfortable accessing all their data geo and non-geo via intake.

This repo has been a little neglected over the past year or so and the ecosystem has come a long way. There is a STAC sprint next week and it might be a good opportunity to tidy things up. These are the things I am thinking of:

• Triage open issues
• Triage open PRs
• Bring linters/actions/deps uptodate
• Check the geopandas read logic vs what's in https://github.com/TomAugspurger/staccontainers
• Remove dependency on intake-xarray
• Switch the xarray read to just use xpystac (which delegates stacking to stackstac or odc-stac)

Just wanted to put this up in case it's not a good time for some reason (maybe because of intake/intake#737 @martindurant)

[martindurant]

For reference here is the STAC catalog implementation and here the search for Intake 2 - largely copied from the code in this repo.

I have not really been aware of the other changes in the STAC sphere. I am thoroughly in favour of improving the intake side of things, and I think we have an important part to play. Come to next wee'k pangeo talk to see what my plans are for Intake 2.

[scottyhq]

There is a STAC sprint next week and it might be a good opportunity to tidy things up

Nice (https://cloudnativegeo.org/blog/2023/07/stac-sprint-8)! A lot of intake-stac development definitely happened at previous STAC sprints. @jsignell I just added you as a maintainer in case you do want to work on this at the sprint.

Check the geopandas read logic vs what's in https://github.com/TomAugspurger/staccontainers. Switch the xarray read to just use xpystac .

I think this is the key piece to rekindle development - articulating (maybe through short examples) where intake-stac can simplify workflows compared to directly working with those libraries that it would delegate to.

[jsignell]

Well as you might have guessed. This didn't end up happening at the STAC sprint 😞 but I am still optimistic that I'll be able to chip away at it this fall.