SPEAD flavours

The SPEAD protocol is versioned and within a version allows for multiple flavours, with different numbers of bits for item pointer fields. The spead2 library supports all SPEAD-64-XX flavours of version 4, where XX is a multiple of 8.

Furthermore, PySPEAD 0.5.2 has a number of bugs in its implementation of the protocol, which effectively defines a new protocol. This is treated as part of the flavour in spead2. Some receive functions have a bug_compat parameter which specifies which of these bugs to maintain compatibility with:

• spead2.BUG_COMPAT_DESCRIPTOR_WIDTHS: the descriptors are encoded with shape and format fields sized as for SPEAD-64-40, regardless of the actual flavour.

• spead2.BUG_COMPAT_SHAPE_BIT_1: the first byte of a shape is set to 2 to indicate a variably-sized dimension, instead of 1.

• spead2.BUG_COMPAT_SWAP_ENDIAN: numpy arrays are encoded/decoded in the opposite endianness to that specified in the descriptor.

• spead2.BUG_COMPAT_NO_SCALAR_NUMPY: scalar items specified with a descriptor are transmitted with a descriptor, even if it is possible to convert it to a dtype.

• spead2.BUG_COMPAT_PYSPEAD_0_5_2: all of the above (and any other bugs later found in this version of PySPEAD).

For sending, the full flavour is specified by a spead2.Flavour object. It allows all the fields to be specified to allow for future expansion, but ValueError is raised unless version is 4 and item_pointer_bits is 64. There is a default constructor that returns SPEAD-64-40 with bug compatibility disabled.

class Flavour(version, item_pointer_bits, heap_address_bits, bug_compat=0)

The constructor arguments are available as read-only attributes.