Replace fiona

[valeriupredoi]

From a maintenance point of view, we've had a number of issues related to fiona - we actually have one now, it being the only library in our environment that is still incompat with Python 3.14, and, let's face it - it being a low level library, may cause issues elsewhere, but we are not affected by them if we replace it. fiona is a stand-alone dependency that we use only to read shapefiles, so again, with my maintainer hat on, I can safely say we can replace it with something else (given we get the new API in correctly).

pyogrio is an option (though that requires geopandas directly as optional, so we end up with TWO dependencies instead of one).

We may end up not saying bye to Fiona after all, but just testing the waters see what the @ESMValGroup/technical-lead-development-team think 🍺

[bouweandela]

Indeed development on fiona seems to have slowed down the past year, but it's only been two weeks since Python 3.14 was released, so maybe we should just wait a month or two (or make a pull request to do the update instead of just asking others to do the work for us).

[valeriupredoi]

Indeed development on fiona seems to have slowed down the past year, but it's only been two weeks since Python 3.14 was released, so maybe we should just wait a month or two (or make a pull request to do the update instead of just asking others to do the work for us).

I agree, bud! I am active on both fiona main GH repo and feedstock, unfortunately feedstock says they'd release a new build when fiona upstream releases a new version - all seems to be fine otherwise conda-forge/fiona-feedstock#237