should we add is_equal to checks for frames comparison (the way we want it) ?

[sergpolly]

as silly as it might sound - we might benefit from a tiny function that checks if 2 bedframes are identical ...
it turns out that pandas.DataFrame.equals method is rather strict, and not only it requires a pair of dataframes to have identical values (obviously), identical shapes etc, - but it also requires them to have identical dtypes - which is a bit of a pain, as some of the bioframe methods alter types of start, end columns from int32/64 to pandas.Int64Dtype

so we could have something like that the library:

bioframe.is_equal_OR_equal_intervals_OR_something_like_that(
    df1,
    df2,
    check_dtypes=False, 
    compare_coordinates_only=True, # compare chrom,start,end and ignore other columns ...
    cols1=None,
    cols2=None
    common_dtypes = {?}
    # what else ?
)

where we can make sure a pair of frames with "acceptable" differences (different names of chrom,start,end, presence of extra columns, dtypes differences, etc), can be recognized as "identical"

[gfudenberg]

were you thinking to check if the set of intervals are the same irrespective of order? ignoring or preserving duplicates?