Tom Nicholas

To be clear the aim here is to do both of @shoyer 's suggestions, probably in 2 separate PRs

This should be closed by #9297.

This is an incredible write-up of the question @shoyer ! This will be very useful for getting people's feedback on. Nit: The only part I think could be clearer is...

> [when opening a single group of a zarr store from object storage] we need to go outside of the scope of the group to retrieve such information @etienneschalk it's...

> @TomNicholas do you mean `open_datatree_as_dict(path)` or am I missing something? @flamingbear I don't know what to call it, but the most literal name would be `open_as_dict_of_datasets`. As I said...

Thanks everyone for your input here! Here's what I'm hearing: > the inheritance of coordinate variables is a very intuitive concept > Inherited coordinates would allow us to have multiple...

> Some 1-D coordinate variables have associated "bounds" variables [per the CF-Conventions](https://cfconventions.org/Data/cf-conventions/cf-conventions-1.10/cf-conventions.html#cell-boundaries). This led me to two questions: Xarray has a [policy](https://docs.xarray.dev/en/stable/getting-started-guide/faq.html#what-is-your-approach-to-metadata) of generally not special-casing behaviour to follow any...

> the dataset is not returned by the function, so the caller has no way of closing it either. This is the problem - I wonder if we can set...

Yes, but this would be much easier to do after #473.

This is an important and annoying missing feature when serializing to kerchunk. Thanks for raising it explicitly. However, if you use [Icechunk](https://github.com/earth-mover/icechunk) as a serialization format instead you won't have...