issue_comments: 57926291

@akleeman I just read over my rebased versions of this patch again, and unfortunately, although there are some useful features here (missing value support and not writing trivial indexes), overall I don't think this is the right approach.

The idea of decoding data stores into "CF decoded" data stores is clever, but (1) it adds a large amount of indirection/complexity and (2) it's not even flexible enough (e.g., it won't suffice to decode coordinates, since those only exist on datasets). Functions for CF decoding/encoding that transform a datastore to a dataset directly (and vice versa), more similar to the existing design, seem like a better option overall.

As we discussed, adding an argument like an array_hook to open_dataset and to_netcdf (patterned off of object_hook from the json module) should suffice for at least our immediate custom encoding/decoding needs.

To make things more extensible, let's add a handful of utility functions/classes to the public API (e.g., NDArrayMixin), and break down existing functions like encode_cf_variable/decode_cf_variable into more modular/extensible components.