issues: 1675299031

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id node_id number title user state locked assignee milestone comments created_at updated_at closed_at author_association active_lock_reason draft pull_request body reactions performed_via_github_app state_reason repo type
1675299031 I_kwDOAMm_X85j2wjX 7770 Provide a public API for adding new backends 90008 closed 0     3 2023-04-19T17:06:24Z 2023-04-20T00:15:23Z 2023-04-20T00:15:23Z CONTRIBUTOR      

Is your feature request related to a problem?

I understand that this is a double edge sword. but we were relying on BACKEND_ENTRYPOINTS being a dictionary to a class and that broke in

https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/7523

Describe the solution you'd like

Some agreed upon way that we could create a new backend. This would allow users to provide more custom parameters to file creation attributes and other options that are currently not exposed via xarray.

I've used this to overwrite some parameters like netcdf global variables.

I've also used this to add alignment_threshold and alignment_interval to h5netcdf.

I did it through a custom backend because it felt like a contentious feature at the time. (I really do think it helps performance).

Describe alternatives you've considered

A deprecation cycle in the future???

Maybe this could have been acheived with the definition of RELOADABLE_BACKEND_ENTRYPOINTS and leaving the BACKEND_ENTRYPOINTS unchanged in signature.

Additional context

We used this to define the alignment within a file. netcdf4 exposed this as a global variable so we have to somewhat hack around it just before creation time.

I mean, you can probably say:

"Doing this is too complicated, we don't want to give any guarantees on this front."

I would agree with you.....

 
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