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Diffstat (limited to 'RELEASE')
| -rw-r--r-- | RELEASE | 78 |
1 files changed, 78 insertions, 0 deletions
@@ -1,6 +1,84 @@ Release information for hdf5-1.0.0a ----------------------------------- + CHANGES SINCE THE FIRST ALPHA + +* Two of the packages have been renamed. The data space API has been + renamed from `H5P' to `H5S' and the property list (template) API has + been renamed from `H5C' to `H5P'. + +* The new attribute API `H5A' has been added. An attribute is a small + dataset which can be attached to some other object (for instance, a + 4x4 transformation matrix attached to a 3-dimensional dataset, or an + English abstract attached to a group). + +* The error handling API `H5E' has been completed. By default, when an + API function returns failure an error stack is displayed on the + standard error stream. The H5Eset_auto() controls the automatic + printing and H5E_BEGIN_TRY/H5E_END_TRY macros can temporarily + disable the automatic error printing. + +* Support for large files and datasets (>2GB) has been added. There + is an html document that describes how it works. Some of the types + for function arguments have changed to support this: all arguments + pertaining to sizes of memory objects are `size_t' and all arguments + pertaining to file sizes are `hsize_t'. + +* More data type conversions have been added although none of them are + fine tuned for performance. There are new converters from integer + to integer and float to float, but not between integers and floating + points. A bug has been fixed in the converter between compound + types. + +* The numbered types have been removed from the API: int8, uint8, + int16, uint16, int32, uint32, int64, uint64, float32, and float64. + Use standard C types instead. Similarly, the numbered types were + removed from the H5T_NATIVE_* architecture; use unnumbered types + which correspond to the standard C types like H5T_NATIVE_INT. + +* More debugging support was added. If tracing is enabled at + configuration time and the HDF5_TRACE environment variable is set to + a file descriptor then all API calls will emit the function name, + argument names and values, and return value on that file number. + There is an html document that describes this. If appropriate + debugging options are enabled at configuration time, some packages + will display performance information on stderr. + +* Data types can be stored in the file as independent objects and + multiple datasets can share a data type. + +* The raw data I/O stream has been implemented and the application can + control meta and raw data caches, so I/O performance should be + improved from the first alpha release. + +* Group and attribute query functions have been implemented so it is + now possible to find out the contents of a file with no prior + knowledge. + +* External raw data storage allows datasets to be written by other + applications or I/O libraries and described and accessed through + HDF5. + +* Hard and soft (symbolic) links are implemented which allow groups to + share objects. + +* User-defined data compression is implemented although we may + generalize the interface to allow arbitrary user-defined filters + which can be used for compression, checksums, encryption, + performance monitoring, etc. The publicly-available `deflate' + method is predefined if the GNU libz.a can be found at configuration + time. + +* The configuration scripts have been modified to make it easier to + build debugging vs. production versions of the library. + +* The library automatically checks that the application was compiled + with the correct version of header files. + +* Parallel feature changes...(?) + + LIST OF API FUNCTIONS + The following functions are implemented. Errors are returned if an attempt is made to use some feature which is not implemented and printing the error stack will show `not implemented yet'. |