Update of the min_threshold_dist_from_shapefile function to support geopandas objects directly.

[PhilipeRLeal]

5. The justification for this PR is: The min_threshold_dist_from_shapefile function (from libpysal.utils) was updated so to support a geopandas GeoDataFrame or a geopandas.GeoSeries object directly. This Pull Request's update also ensured back-compatibility with the min_threshold_dist_from_shapefile elder behavior - of dealing with strings pointing towards shapefile filepaths.

Implications:

None

[codecov]

Codecov Report

Merging #436 (acbbb82) into master (a86520c) will increase coverage by 0.0%.
The diff coverage is 33.3%.

@@          Coverage Diff           @@
##           master    #436   +/-   ##
======================================
  Coverage    79.7%   79.7%           
======================================
  Files         120     120           
  Lines       12710   12715    +5     
======================================
+ Hits        10128   10138   +10     
+ Misses       2582    2577    -5     

Impacted Files	Coverage Δ
libpysal/weights/util.py	75.2% <33.3%> (-0.6%)	⬇️
libpysal/_version.py	40.7% <0.0%> (+2.7%)	⬆️

[martinfleis]

I have very mixed feelings here.

The change in this PR is perfectly fine code-wise (just see the note in the code).

But API-wise, this is a bit messy but that is more for a general discussion among libpysal team. *from_shapefile should be a different thing than *from_dataframe. In the ideal case, we wouldn't need any *from_shapefile or *from_dataframe. We should assume that the input is GeoDataFrame and leave the file IO to geopandas.

There is a lot of legacy code in libpysal that should be cleaned and refactored based on geopandas and pygeos. Short term, we may just merge this assuming that these functions will eventually be deprecated anyway. But I would surely not go in the direction of shapefile==GeoDataFrame within our API.

[PhilipeRLeal]

Dear @martinfleis,

thank's for the feedback. Your suggestion was completely right, and it has beeen accepted in this new commit.

SIncerely,