add suggestions from review

Author: kmuehlbauer

doc/whats-new.rst

@@ -47,7 +47,10 @@ Breaking changes
   ``"S"``, ``"L"``, ``"U"``, or ``"N"``.  This is to be consistent with the
   deprecation of the latter frequency strings (:issue:`8394`, :pull:`8415`). By
   `Spencer Clark <https://github.com/spencerkclark>`_.
+  By `Justus Magin <https://github.com/keewis`_.
 - Bump minimum tested pint version to ``>=0.22``. By `Deepak Cherian <https://github.com/dcherian>`_.
+- Minimum supported versions for the following packages have changed: ``h5py >=3.7``, ``h5netcdf>=1.1``.
+  By `Kai Mühlbauer <https://github.com/kmuehlbauer>`_.
 
 Deprecations
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~

xarray/coding/variables.py

@@ -564,7 +564,7 @@ def decode(self):
         raise NotImplementedError()
 
 
-class ObjectStringCoder(VariableCoder):
+class ObjectVLenStringCoder(VariableCoder):
     def encode(self):
         return NotImplementedError
 

xarray/conventions.py

@@ -266,7 +266,7 @@ def decode_cf_variable(
         var = strings.EncodedStringCoder().decode(var)
 
     if original_dtype == object:
-        var = variables.ObjectStringCoder().decode(var)
+        var = variables.ObjectVLenStringCoder().decode(var)
         original_dtype = var.dtype
 
     if mask_and_scale: