This has come up before, e.g. see [1] [2] [3]. I would say "Feather" is effectively deprecated and we are using "Arrow IPC" now but I am not sure what others think. (From that GitHub link, it seems to be mixed.) And ".arrow" is the official extension now (since it is registered as part of our MIME type). But there's existing documentation and not everything has been updated to be consistent (as you saw).
[1]: https://lists.apache.org/thread/0s6lgvd3g56ymd60vl5lgzhf4ro6hts5 [2]: https://arrow.apache.org/faq/#what-about-the-feather-file-format [3]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67910612/arrow-ipc-vs-feather/67911190#67911190 -David On Mon, Aug 29, 2022, at 10:50, 島 達也 wrote: > Hi all. > > I know the documentation (mainly pyarrow documentation) sometimes refers > to IPC files as Feather files, but are there any guidelines for when to > refer to an IPC file as a Feather file and when to refer to it as an IPC > file? > I believe that calling the same file an Arrow IPC file at times and a > Feather file at other times is confusing to those unfamiliar with Apache > Arrow (myself included). > Surprisingly, these files may even have completely different extensions, > ".arrow" and ".feather", which are not similar. > > Perhaps there are several options for future use of the name Feather, > such as > > 1. The name Feather V2 is deprecated. Only the extension ".arrow" will > be used for IPC files. > 2. In some contexts(?), IPC files are referred to as Feather; only > ".arrow" is used for the IPC file extension to clearly distinguish > it from Feather V1's ".feather". > 3. When an IPC file is called Feather by some rule, extension > ".feather" is used, and when an IPC file is not called Feather, > extension ".arrow" is used. > > I mistakenly thought the current status was 2, but according to the > discussion in this PR (https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/13677), > apparently the current status seems 3. (However, there seems to be no > rule as to when an IPC file should be called a Feather) > > I am not very familiar with Arrow and this is my first post to this > mailing list so I apologize if I have done something wrong or inappropriate. > > Best, > SHIMA Tatsuya
