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Pytables dependency removal
Source code inspection for the conda-forge feedstock found that pytables is not referenced anywhere and could be removed as a dependency. Is this true, and if so should it be removed from both the conda-forge and local requirements?
I believe that pytables is (used to be?) required downstream by one of our dependencies (maybe HDF5 saving of pandas files?), but that's not a good reason for us to require it. By the same token, I don't think we actually use cf_units ourselves either (iris does require it). I'm in favor of removing both of these requirements.
I figured out why pytables is currently required. Reading and writing hdf5 from pandas requires pytables as an optional dependency.
That said, I'm not opposed to removing pytables as a dependency, but we would probably want to move the tutorial notebooks to saving the pandas output as pickle or something. The pandas-generated HDF5 files are pretty much only readable by pandas anyway.
I'm going to tag this as v1.5 and will do this along with #196. We should probably also remove cf-units as a dependency given that we don't use it directly.