issue_comments: 47198553

Some additional thoughts on the advanced interface (we should discuss more when we're both awake):

The advanced interface should support specifying decoding or encoding only (e.g., if we only need to read some obscure format, not write it).

Instead of all these DataStore subclasses, what about having more generic Coder (singleton?) objects which have encode and/or decode methods, but that don't store any data? It is somewhat confusing to keep track of state with all these custom datastores.

A neat trick about coders rather than data stores is that they are simple enough that they could be easily composed, similar to a scikit-learn pipeline. For example, the default CFCoder could be written as something like:

CFCoder = Compose(TimeCoder, ScaleCoder, MaskCoder, DTypeCoder)

I suppose the painful part of using coders is the need to close files on disk to cleanup. Still, I would rather have a single EncodedDataStore class which is initialized with coder and underlying_store arguments (either classes or objects) rather than have the primary interface be writing custom AbstractEncodedDataStore subclasses. That feels like unnecessary complexity.

Instead of using the decorator, the interface could look something like:

CFNetCDFStore = EncodedDataStore(CFCoder, NetCDF4DataStore)

or

my_store = EncodedDataStore(CFCoder(**my_options), NetCDF4DataStore('test.nc'))