Separate out encoding.py as multicodec ?

[heaven00]

The encoding.py code seems a lot like multicodec implementation, should we separate it out ? so that it can be used in py-ifps too ?

[whereswaldon]

I looked around a little, but didn't find the multicodec specs. What is it responsible for? encoding.py basically just handles, JSON and a couple other formats. Is that the purpose of multicodec?

[heaven00]

yeah, that's the purpose of it, more details https://github.com/multiformats/multicodec

so its one of the requirements listed here too ipfs-shipyard/py-ipfs#23

[ntninja]

I like the idea, but reviewing the current multicodec spec it seems the current encoding.py only handles the “how do I decode data with the given type” part; it doesn't actually provide a multicodec parser yet.
My suggestion would therefore be to start an independent project that provides a full multicodec implementation (optionally based on encoding.py). Once it reaches the level of maturity required to be usable on it's own (particularly by the py-ipfs project), we can then integrate it into this project and (possibly) make it an official ipfs project (at least I would do some lobbying towards that goal).

[fredthomsen]

I have started a python multicodec implementation https://github.com/fredthomsen/py-multicodec. I believe only json works correctly right now. I'll look and seeing if we can integrate this.

[heaven00]

lets complete the module first and then integrate ?
I would love to help out too on this :)

[fredthomsen]

Another problem is that we need to make py-multicodec support streaming, currently it only takes fixed length rather than streams.

[ntninja]

I've looked at https://github.com/multiformats/py-multicodec (now existing multicodec implementation in Python) and it doesn't look like encoding.py at all. Leading me to believe that this was some kind of misunderstanding here. If anything, encoding.py (or rather the library written by @fredthomsen) seems to more closely resemble what https://github.com/ipld/py-ipld-dag would like to achieve if it contained any code. With recent changes encoding.py is now hardly more than a glorified JSON parser and even before that there wasn't much to “separate out” in the first place.
This will therefor be closed, open a new issue if you think that you can provide a replacement for encoding.py but for now we'll stick to the required JSON and byte stream handling.