DOC: import geopandas recommendation

Now in most places, we do

import geopandas as gpd

and it is certainly good to be consistent.

However, I wanted to check what the appetite is for changing this to a version without the aliasing. So just import geopandas, and then geopandas.read_file(..), geopandas.sjoin(..), … In case you use eg GeoDataFrame a lot, you can also do from geopandas import GeoDataFrame.

The reason for this is that from some recent conversations, I got convinced that ideally, you choose a package name such that you don’t need to shorten the import, as doing that creates additional overhead (it is less directly recognizable in the code where something is coming from if you are less familiar with the package, you get different aliases used in the wild, …). I personally think geopandas is short enough (and you typically use mainly method calls) to not need an alias, but on the other hand, it might also be a bit late to change this.

[jdmcbr]

I’m with @kuanb on this one; so long as import pandas as pd is the standard, sticking with import geopandas as gpd seems like it is fairly clear.

[jorisvandenbossche]

https://github.com/geopandas/geopandas/pull/774