[Numpy-discussion] Home for pyhdf5io?

[David Warde-Farley]

On 23-May-09, at 5:36 AM, Albert Thuswaldner wrote:

> So i guess in the long term i have to also add pickling support. In
> the short term i will add warnings for the data types that are not
> supported.

In order to ensure optimal division of labour, I'd suggest simply  
basing your pickling support on hdf5pickle, and including it as an  
optional dependency, that you detect at runtime  (just put the import  
in a try block and catch the ImportError). If you have hdf5pickle  
installed, pyhdf5io will pickle any objects you try to use save()  
with, etc. Otherwise it will just work the way it does now.

I think that satisfies the goals of your project as being a thin  
wrapper that provides a simple interface, rather than reinventing the  
wheel by re-implementing hdf5 pickling. It also means that there  
aren't two, maybe-incompatible ways to pickle an object in HDF5 --  
just one (even if you write your implementation to be compatible with  
Pauli's, there's opportunity for the codebases to diverge over time).

David