Core Protocol v3.0

This page provides a scratch pad for collecting discussion and decision points relating to work on the core protocol v3.0.

For each of the following features, should they be defined and supported by the core protocol, or should they be defined via protocol extensions:

• Hard & soft links
• Truncating edge chunks
• Variable length dimensions
• Infinite (unbounded) length dimensions
• Datetime and timedelta dtypes
• Structure dtypes
• Variable size dtypes
• Sparse arrays
• Negative chunk indices (expanding arrays in "both directions")

Some other miscellaneous questions:

• Can you build a hierarchy just by looking at what metadata keys are present in a store? I.e., does the mere presence of a key like /foo/.zgroup imply a group exists at hierarchy path /foo? What if the value of the key is an empty document, or an invalid document? Xref #17.