mne-tools / mne-tools/mne-python
Maint: Offload GDF reading duties to biosig?
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
- 3.5k
- Forks
- 1.6k
- Avg merge
- 1d 6h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 100
Description
The biosig-tools development team maintains a Python wrapper to their C++ library libbiosig, which can be used to read GDF files into Python as Numpy arrays (PyPI link).
Currently it requires the user to pre-install the libbiosig, which is not ideal. But if they ever get around to shipping libbiosig in platform-specific wheels, Then it might be worthwhile for MNE-Python to rely on this package for reading GDF files. The benefit would be that we offload GDF reading duties to the file-format experts, reduce our maintenance burden and (hopefully) cut down the LOC in MNE. The downside is that this new reader is not pure Python.
This would follow the approach we have taken with AntIO and EDFIO. I also think that MATLAB already relies on the libbiosig package for reading/writing GDF files.
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Begin by verifying whether biosig-tools can ship platform-specific libbiosig wheels, then compare the proposed integration with MNE-Python’s AntIO and EDFIO approach. Done would require an agreed migration scope for GDF reading and a decision on whether the dependency and non-pure-Python implementation are acceptable.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- cpp, python
- Domain
- data
- Issue type
- Refactor
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Needs clarification
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100