API extension plans

[jeromekelleher]

We now have a single method compare which produces one (well, several related) measures of distance between two ARGs. It's not clear to me how this package would evolve over time if we wanted to add other ways to compare them. Suppose we just wanted the standard span-weighted tree-by-tree comparison, like

def tree_by_tree(ts1, ts2, metric="KC"):
    if metric == "KC":
        return ts1.kc_distance(ts2)
   elif metric == "RF":
        # do something else
   else:
        raise ValueError(f"Unknown metric {metric}")

Do you imagine things like this getting folded into the single uber-function compare (a-la msprime.sim_ancestry), or the API growing additional entry points @petrelharp? If the latter, maybe we should chose something a bit more specific than compare as the name?