how should xarray handle pandas attrs

[dcherian]

Continuing discussion form #3491.

Pandas has added attrs to their objects. We should decide on what to do with them in the DataArray constructor. Many tests fail if we don't handle this case explicitly.

@dcherian:

Not sure what we want to do about these attributes in the long term. One option would be to pop the name attribute, assign to DataArray.name and keep the rest as DataArray.attrs? But what if name clashes with the provided name?

@max-sixty:

Agree! I think we could prioritize the supplied name above that in attrs. Another option would be raising an error if both were supplied.

[snowman2]

Not sure what we want to do about these attributes in the long term.

I like the idea of using them the same way xarray does for metadata. The next step would be to get pandas to add .encoding and then they could do mask_and_scale on their read_* methods :).