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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'.