issue_comments: 367166682

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/1784#issuecomment-367166682 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/1784 367166682 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDM2NzE2NjY4Mg== 2443309 2018-02-21T00:10:04Z 2018-02-21T00:10:04Z MEMBER

What does ds.to_netcdf(...) usually return?

If sync == False the store is returned, otherwise nothing is returned.

The term future, when used in a Dask context, generally refers to something that is off computing asynchronously somewhere, rather than a token that holds onto a yet-to-be-submitted lazy graph.

Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't aware of that distinction but it does make sense.

What is store in this case?

A store is AbstractWritableDataStore, basically a wrapper class to allow us to read/write to various fileformats with various APIs under a common interface. Notably, each store has a writer attribute with a sync method that calls dask.array.store.

Another way to do this would be to have user code interact with the sync method directly:

```Python store = ds.to_netcdf('file.nc', sync=False)

store.sync calls store.writer.sync() which calls dask.array.sync

delayed_things = store.sync(compute=False) ```

This has the advantage of keeping the to_netcdf method a bit cleaner but does expose the AbstractWritableDataStore to user code which is typically not a public API object. 

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