Remove GeoPandas dependency

[mdtanker]

Description of the desired feature:

GeoPandas is causing some issues with Poetry and packaging/install on a Windows machine, I think mostly due to its C dependencies. Since we only use it to read shapefiles, there might be an alternative.

• This thread suggests Pandas/Shapely or Spatialpandas.

• Or maybe pyshp with this Gist

• Look here for discussion on spatialpandas

• Article on using Arcpy

• Link to using spark.read.shapefile()

• Another similar one

Are you willing to help implement and maintain this feature?

[mdtanker]

Two more thinks to consider:

• look into using dask-geopandas to speed up reading large shapefiles.

• maybe switch to geopandas-base to reduce dependencies.

[weiji14]

Have you checked out https://github.com/geopandas/pyogrio?

[mdtanker]

Look's like it still requires GeoPandas to read a .shp 😑, so I think I'd still need to include GeoPandas in the .toml dependencies, which won't work on Windows, unless I'm missing something. Thanks though 😄

[weiji14]

Ah yes, that's true. But I think pyogrio also ships with GDAL in the wheels (see geopandas/pyogrio#48, geopandas/pyogrio#112 (comment), and notice at https://pypi.org/project/pyogrio/0.4.1/#files how the .whl files are quite big) whereas geopandas on PyPI doesn't ship with GDAL (so you need to do conda install gdal). In other words, if you do pip install pyogrio[geopandas], you should be indirectly getting GDAL already without going through conda, if that was the original issue on Windows. That said, I've not tested this so not sure how well it works in practice.

For reference, if you're using poetry, the pyogrio[geopandas] dependency line would look like pyogrio = {version = ">=0.4.0", extras = ["geopandas"]} (e.g. at https://github.com/weiji14/zen3geo/blob/71e886d95454de70651cc31ea6dedc33e929145c/pyproject.toml#L25)

[mdtanker]

Amazing! Thanks for that 👍 I originally tried pip install pyogrio[geopandas] which wasn't working, but pip install --pre pyogrio[geopandas] did the trick. I'll add that in my .toml to save some hassle for separately install geopandas with conda.

Any idea if a similar approach will be taken withPyGMT to include GMT in a pip install?

[weiji14]

Amazing! Thanks for that 👍 I originally tried pip install pyogrio[geopandas] which wasn't working, but pip install --pre pyogrio[geopandas] did the trick. I'll add that in my .toml to save some hassle for separately install geopandas with conda.

Cool, glad that it worked!

Any idea if a similar approach will be taken withPyGMT to include GMT in a pip install?

Some day perhaps, see GenericMappingTools/pygmt#1853 😉

[mdtanker]

I've tried to replace geopandas with pyogrio in poetry, but am still having issues. It worked fine to just add pyogrio, but to read a shapefile, geopandas still needs to be installed. This can be done with pip install geopandas --no-deps, but I haven't found a way to get poetry to add geopandas without also adding its dependency fiona, which causes issues on windows.

For now I've added pyogrio to the dependencies, but will inform users to separately install geopandas.

[mdtanker]

We now use Geopandas for more than just reading shapefiles, so for now will close this as it is a core dependency.