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Description
see #10678 (comment) and following 4 comments
In brief:
- the idea is to have one "export" function (and method) for raw, epochs, and evoked
- these functions delegate all the heavy lifting to functions that ideally are maintained and developed outside of mne (such as https://github.com/bids-standard/pybv) ... mne mostly contains a small wrapper around the external heavy lifting functions
- in some cases, these wrappers will be more involved (see EDF e.g., https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python/blob/main/mne/export/_edf.py)
- ... and in some cases the "heavy lifting" function might be internal altogether (see MFF e.g., https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python/blob/main/mne/export/_egimff.py)
- ideally though, the code in mne is minimal.
the problem
- some exporting funcs will accept additional parameters that are irrelevant to other exporting funcs
- for EDF this is done by adding these params to the general export function and noting only for EDF, see: https://mne.tools/stable/generated/mne.export.export_raw.html#mne.export.export_raw
- yet for MFF, the solution is to make the heavy lifting export function itself public, see: https://mne.tools/stable/generated/mne.export.export_evokeds_mff.html
this is inconsistent, and we should clean that up / make a consistent choice before the module continues to grow.
IMHO, the current "MFF way" is not a good style and would lead to lots of confusing public functions, instead of the clean "trinity" of raw, epochs, evoked .export. Couldn't we solve this by allowing **kwargs and documenting the kwargs that can be passed? Similar to how we do it in ICA when users pick picard or fastica, etc.
What are your opinions?