Add more "Other Known Implementations"

[mxmlnkn]

Feel free to close this PR if it is not desired. I can understand that listing projects can be seen as some kind of tacit approval or recommendation and therefore one might not want to add any links.

Personally, I was incentivized to start this because of our discussions about the sshfs alternative that was not mentioned in this list. But, as I am currently integrating fsspec backends into ratarmount, I was also looking for other interesting looking ones that would be worth testing out and adding integrations tests and documentation for. Personally, I found ipfsspec very interesting, and it was also missing even though it also is under the fsspec Github namespace. The iRODS backend also looks interesting as I considered iRODS in the past, but the fsspec bindings have not seen updates for 3 years... The same fate as many other projects I found.

Discovery by searching for fsspec.register_implementation,
project.entry-points."fsspec.specs", and inheritance from AbstractFileSystem or AsyncFileSystem.

List of projects that I did not include in the PR because I simply do not have any expertise in these and therefore do not know about their usefulness or because they looked abandoned or unfinished:

• flyte://
• langtracefs://
• snow://
• pangu://
• sfs://
• wasb://
• flywheel://
• render://
• oceanum://
• rediscache://
• cdffs://
• git-annex://
• pelican://
• dnanexus://
• rclone://
• ec:// or ectmp://
• polarisfs://
• faculty-datasets://
• v3io://
• argopy
• CANedge
• ipsfpy
• AzFS
• CHFS
• dCacheFS

Some questions that came out while doing this:

• Does "Other known implementations" only include those
  • listed as dependencies: https://github.com/fsspec/filesystem_spec/blob/master/pyproject.toml ?
  • listed in fsspec/registry.py https://github.com/fsspec/filesystem_spec/blob/master/fsspec/registry.py ?
  • if not, should these new mentions added as dependencies or to the registry? Probably not without the approval of the respective maintainers.
• The usage of package name vs. storage protocol name is unclear in this list
• I was not sure where to do the cut-off regards to widespread usage. At least 10 stars and/or recent commits?
• I am not sure whether those "references" with hyphens in them will work. I do not even know what format .rst is ...

[martindurant]

Interesting, there are many here that I was not aware of.

Historically, entries has gone into the docs by request, without anyone actively seeking them out. This is even more true of the internal registry; but of course, being listed there isn't necessary to be useful under fsspec (with or without entry point metadata).

For this doc section, perhaps it would be good to add more general text about how the links were found, maybe even include the specific searches you used. We could choose to mark those that are hosted by the fsspec github org.

Being listed in pyproject is about convenience, e.g., for testing, not really about the needs of end users.