Provide entrypoint for xarray backend?

[rabernat]

Hello and thanks for working on this great project! 👏

I am an Xarray developer. We would really love to be able to store xarray data in Caterva. In order to accomplish this, we would need an xarray backend entrypoint from Caterva.

I am not sure right now if this is possible because Caterva seems to only support storage of individual arrays. Xarray needs the notion of "groups" (multiple related arrays) in order to store Datasets. Are there plans to introduce groups in Caterva?

[FrancescAlted]

Hi @rabernat, thanks for your interest in Caterva.

No, there were no plans to introduce groups. Having said that, we discussed that internally and we do think that this would be a great addition, and that the appropriate place to support this would be the C-Blosc2 library. This way the libraries relying on it (including Caterva) will all get the benefit.

With that, we have updated the C-Blosc2 roadmap accordingly: https://github.com/Blosc/c-blosc2/blob/main/ROADMAP.rst#actions-to-be-done . We are considering asking for a grant (probably for the next round of NumFOCUS' Small Development Grants) for implementing checksums, but this one could also receive some love too :-)