to_netcdf can fail due to usage of CategoricalDtype

[smithara]

Current versions of (pandas/xarray?) are now causing a failure in xarray.Dataset.to_netcdf with the datasets generated by viresclient where "Spacecraft" is stored as a pandas.Categorical, where this didn't happen before.

VirES-Python-Client/src/viresclient/_data_handling.py

Line 238 in f15fa07

ds["Spacecraft"] = (

For example:

import pandas as pd
import xarray as xr

ds = xr.Dataset(
    data_vars={
        "x": ("t", pd.Categorical(["A", "B", "B", "A"], categories=["A", "B"]))
    }
)
ds.to_netcdf("test.h5")

fails with:

TypeError: Cannot interpret 'CategoricalDtype(categories=['A', 'B'], ordered=False, categories_dtype=object)' as a data type

[smithara]

Workaround:
Downgrade to xarray 2024.3.0