Bugfix/binary parameter truncation fix

[medley56]

Summary

This prepares for a patch release 6.1.2 with a fix for binary parameter truncation when the binary blob is longer than 4 bytes.

Fixes #246.

Approach

The only way np.asarray will correctly identify the required size for a binary blob is to pass in a bytes object (not a bytes subclass like BinaryParameter). After much digging and many attempts at changing the MRO of BinaryParameter, it appears the only fix is to conditionally cast BinaryParameter objects to bytes objects before attempting to create a numpy array.

Other Considered Option

One option that did work was to change the parent type of BinaryParameter from bytes to np.bytes_, which correctly registers the class as a subclass of np.bytes_ and results in numpy correctly determining the size of the bytes object.

However, this would require making numpy a core dependency of Space Packet Parser, something we have long worked to avoid.

Performance Impact

This conditional recreation of a bytes object from BinaryParameter in create_dataset does impact performance when creating an xarray Dataset from packets containing BinaryParameter objects. The impact is due to creating a second, immutable copy of every BinaryParameter object (one at a time).

There should be almost no memory impact but there will be a timing impact due to the conditional check and the creation of new bytes objects. This impact should only matter for packets that include binary blobs though.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Fixes binary parameter truncation in xarr.create_dataset when BinaryParameter values exceed 4 bytes, preparing for patch release 6.1.2 (fixes #246).

Changes:

• Convert common.BinaryParameter instances to plain bytes before passing values to NumPy, preventing truncation during np.asarray dtype sizing.
• Add a unit test to ensure binary parameter byte-width is preserved in the resulting xarray.Dataset.
• Bump several GitHub Actions workflow dependencies and adjust the GitHub Release creation step to use a safer argument array pattern.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 5 out of 6 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
space_packet_parser/xarr.py	Casts BinaryParameter to bytes prior to NumPy array creation to prevent truncation.
tests/unit/test_xarr.py	Adds regression test asserting 8-byte binary fields remain 8 bytes and untruncated in datasets.
.gitignore	Ignores node_modules.
.github/workflows/release.yml	Updates artifact download action version and refactors gh release create invocation.
.github/workflows/ci.yml	Updates Codecov GitHub Action version.
.github/workflows/_build.yml	Updates artifact upload action version.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 94.85%. Comparing base (84d2a76) to head (0660a8f).
⚠️ Report is 1 commits behind head on release/6.1.

Additional details and impacted files

@@               Coverage Diff               @@
##           release/6.1     #247      +/-   ##
===============================================
+ Coverage        94.82%   94.85%   +0.02%     
===============================================
  Files               48       48              
  Lines             3868     3885      +17     
===============================================
+ Hits              3668     3685      +17     
  Misses             200      200              

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