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The DataSource abstraction is necessary but might be a little confusing at first.

It would be helpful to add at least one example, that is also directly usable by user code. The code in group_test.rs is pretty close; it only needs better error handling.

To determine if a program can parse a data file or protocol, we should be able to generate some kind of "data structure manifest", which includes the message id and latest version of each data structure in the group.

A program could contain a compiled-in manifest, and by comparing the two can determine whether it's capable of reading a file.

This might be useful in other ways, e.g.

• A serializer could use the manifest to compress or elide the data headers, e.g. replacing {msg_id: 123, ver: 4} with ManifestIndex(5).
• A manifest hash could behave like a fingerprint, to determine roughly which version of software wrote a file.
• A manifest could be locked down and enforced via unit tests, if a format is expected to be frozen and never changed.