Davis Bennett

> What is the API to not write a shard until you finished processing all the chunks? I see the issue now! we have no such API for this. One...

after looking into this a bit more and starting a draft implementation of this idea, I noticed that the semantics of some of the store operations varies too much across...

i imagine `ObjectStore` doesn't have a path because we don't require it as part of the store ABC. Because Zarr IO is fundamentally hierarchical, I think it would be reasonable...

i'm imagining that the `path` / `prefix` attribute doesn't impose any restrictions on the API used for opening the store. it just scopes the operations that the store will perform...

> Given that JSON doesn't distinguish between float32 vs float64, I'm not quite sure what is the correct behavior. My preference is for attributes encoding / decoding to be lossless,...

the specific case of encoding a numerical scalar in JSON is probably important enough to warrant some support. I think we could build on the idea to [re-use the JSON...

> **Inconsistency in implementations**: Some tools prohibit extra keys, while others allow them. More pertinently, some tools use extra keys in metadata (https://ngff-zarr.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

that would prevent multiple separate tools from working with the same extra metadata field.

The basic problem is not figuring out which tool wrote an extra field. It's more basic: how should readers handle extra fields at all (whether those fields disclose where they...

to guide any spec changes, we should first ask people who are actively using additional fields what their use case is. That will lead to a conversation about whether the...