Enhance(+) readme and add .gitignore

[omad]

Start splitting out useful and easily reviewable parts of the two long standing PRs on this repo.

.gitignore is from the native-load PR
and the README is mostly from the Rust Geomedian PR.

[robbibt]

@omad Not sure this is the best place, but just a few stray thoughts on this repo:

• Although this repo contains some fantastic tools, it is difficult to install, which has a big impact on all our downstream packages that use it (e.g. DEA Tools, DEA Intertidal etc). Making the requirements more minimal and/or moving dependencies to optional dependencies would make a big difference
• Strongly agree that we should deprecate any functionality here that overlaps with odc-geo - I think that datacube, odc-geo and odc-stac should be the point of truth wherever possible
• The image processing tools in this repo (dilation, erosion) etc are heavily used in downstream repos. Personally I think they would fit nicely in odc-geo as part of a new masking module there, but it would be great to preserve them here in the meantime (even though skimage is a big dependancy, I've usually found it pretty easy to install)

[omad]

@robbibt

Not sure this is the best place, but just a few stray thoughts on this repo:

Haha 😉 , probably not the best place, but, a place is important, and I'm always keen for your thoughts Robbi!

Although this repo contains some fantastic tools, it is difficult to install, which has a big impact on all our downstream packages that use it (e.g. DEA Tools, DEA Intertidal etc). Making the requirements more minimal and/or moving dependencies to optional dependencies would make a big difference

Okay, we can absolutely make some dependencies optional. It's easy and a step in the right direction.

It sounds like some deprecating/deleting and restructuring are also in order, which will take a bit more to achieve.

Strongly agree that we should deprecate any functionality here that overlaps with odc-geo - I think that datacube, odc-geo and odc-stac should be the point of truth wherever possible

Thanks!

The image processing tools in this repo (dilation, erosion) etc are heavily used in downstream repos. Personally I think they would fit nicely in odc-geo as part of a new masking module there, but it would be great to preserve them here in the meantime (even though skimage is a big dependancy, I've usually found it pretty easy to install)

That's good to know! I wasn't even aware there were masking tools in odc-geo. 💡

IIRC, we only use a tiny tiny part of skimage, so it might even be worth vendoring that bit, or getting it from elsewhere.

[robbibt]

That's good to know! I wasn't even aware there were masking tools in odc-geo. 💡

There isn't "yet". But there are discussions around doing it here: opendatacube/odc-geo#117

(would be particularly nice as masking funcs would then be something you could access via odc-geo's .odc. accessor, e.g. ds.odc.mask_invalid_data() etc instead of calling in external funcs from odc-algo or datacube-core)