Guaranteed Attributes/Methods for headers?

[theXYZT]

Guaranteed Attributes/Methods for headers?

[mhvk]

I think we can only discuss guaranteed attributes for a stream reader; e.g., the Mark 5 header simply does not have information about even the sample shape (nor does the file itself; it has to be passed in...). Indeed, this impossibility of having common information is why I wrote the info class.

[theXYZT]

I assumed from the existence of VLBIHeaderBase that it was the intended "metadata container". Then, I was confused when I noticed that the headers of some formats don't inherit from it at all.

So, we should be using the Info class for all our metadata needs? That's fine then. We can close this issue because it was mainly about having a metadata container common to all formats and it seems Info is fulfilling this goal right now.

[mhvk]

Yes, Info is meant to be the general meta-data container. VLBIHeaderBase just contains methods specific to getting information out of bit-encoded headers, for searching headers, etc.