issue_comments: 816088476

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https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/5033#issuecomment-816088476 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/5033 816088476 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDgxNjA4ODQ3Ng== 14371165 2021-04-08T19:21:10Z 2021-04-08T19:21:10Z MEMBER

The first comment is that I see the point of the feature at a theoretical level, but I'm at the third external backend that I'm writing and I didn't miss it. Adding an entrypoint is very easy and works seamlessly during development.

Do you have in mind any use case where this is more convenient than adding an entrypoint?

I simply want to do: ```python from custom_backend import engine

ds = xr.load_dataset(filename, engine=engine) ``` That is much simpler than having to figure out what the How to register a backend is talking about. Because I'm a user who doesn't have any grand dreams (yet?) of creating public backend modules I therefore don't see the point in having to do all this extra paperwork.

... we ask backend developers to inherit from BackendEntrypoint, for the sake of consistency I would enforce it here as well, instead to use duck-typing.

That's not how I read the docs. If this is how we actually want it then some words in it should be replaced with "must" and "requires".

But I don't think that should be such a hard requirement when a user insists on using a custom engine this way. I see it as an advanced option where it's the users responsibility to make sure that the engine class has * the open_dataset method * the open_dataset_parameters attribute * the guess_can_open method

Which is very simple to do, see the test for an example. Subclassing using BackendEntrypoint adds complexity and readability issues so I want to at least feel a little motivated to use it but there's nothing fancy going on there, is there any plans?

 
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