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Hello!

I've been quite interested in a rust implementation of spacepackets and have enjoyed using your project.

I have been grokking the codebase of the Rust spacepacket implementation and noticed the use of panics in the builder methods, specifically in the const_new and new functions of various structs. While I understand that panics are a part of Rust's error handling mechanism and can be useful for catching exceptional cases, I have concerns regarding their usage in these particular scenarios.

First, in the UnixTimestamp struct, the const_new function panics if the subsec_millis value exceeds 999. Similarly, in the PacketSequenceCtrl struct, both the const_new and new functions panic if the seq_count value exceeds MAX_SEQ_COUNT. Although panics can be appropriate for handling unexpected or invalid inputs, I'm unsure whether they are the best approach in these cases. I do understand for the latter example that these panic conditions are checked before calling, so they won't panic in those cases.

• is this pattern, const_new and new, common for Rust 2021 projects? Would there be preferable ways to call const_new without requiring the caller to check the panic conditions?
• what is the rationale for checking subsec_millis greater than 999? Would there be cases where the value may be user-specified?

Thank you,

Ethan

like i actually just wanted to say thanks

Given the timeprovider example:

let timestamp_now = TimeProvider::from_now_with_u16_days().unwrap();

One could extend the interface of ::from_now_with_u16/24_days() with an optional argument to enable little vs big endianness. Doing this manually on the ouput bytes would be rather cumbersome.