Allow symbolic links between datatree nodes?

[TomNicholas]

What is your issue?

It would be nice if the tree could support internal symbolic links between nodes.

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If someone actually wants this then please speak up! Otherwise we won't prioritise it, because it's not at all simple.

[keewis]

my question for this feature is: can we serialize these links? In other words, do HDF5, zarr, netcdf4, and other file formats we'd want to write a DataTree object to, support these symbolic links? If they do, we should obviously think about adding that feature, but if they don't I think this would possibly be more trouble than it's worth.

[kmuehlbauer]

HDF5 can do all kinds of interlinking, really weird stuff, self referencing and such.

See some examples below ( sorry for the unspeaking link):

https://portal.hdfgroup.org/hdf5/v1_14/_h5_g__u_g.html#title6