Unidata/netcdf-c v4.3.1-rc1

Release Candidate 1 for netCDF-C 4.3.1

on GitHub

These release notes are for the netCDF-C 4.3.1 - RC1. For a complete set of release notes, include all notes for previous releases, please visit:

• http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/release_notes.html

4.3.1-rc1 Released 2013-08-09

• Migrated from the netCDF-C subversion repository to a publically available GitHub repository available at https://github.com/Unidata/netCDF-C. This repository may be checked out (cloned) with the following command:

  $ git clone https://github.com/Unidata/netCDF-C.git

  • Note: in this release, it is necessary to generate the configure script and makefile templates using autoreconf in the root netCDF-C directory.:

  $ autoreconf -i -f

• Added nc_rename_grp to allow for group renaming in netCDF-4 files.
  https://bugtracking.unidata.ucar.edu/browse/NCF-204

• Added a NC_HAVE_RENAME_GRP macro to netcdf.h, as per a request by Charlie Zender. This will allow software compiling against netcdf to easily query whether or not nc_rename_grp() is available.

  • https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/esupport/staff/index.php?_m=tickets&_a=viewticket&ticketid=22442

• Added Greg Sjaardema's contributed optimization for the nc4_find_dim_len function in libsrc4/nc4internal.c. The patch eliminates several malloc/free calls that exist in the original coding.

• Added support for dynamic loading, to compliment the dynamic loading support introduced in hdf 1.8.11. Dynamic loading support depends on libdl, and is enabled as follows:

  • autotools-based builds: --enable-dynamic-loading
  • cmake-based builds: -DENABLE_DYNAMIC_LOADING=ON
    https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/jira/browse/NCF-258

• Fix issue of netCDF-4 parallel independent access with unlimited dimension hanging. Extending the size of an unlimited dimension in HDF5 must be a collective operation, so now an error is returned if trying to extend in independent access mode.

  https://bugtracking.unidata.ucar.edu/browse/NCF-250

• Fixed bug with netCDF-4's inability to read HDF5 scalar numeric attributes. Also allow, in addition to zero length strings, a new NULL pointer as a string value. to improve interoperability with HDF5. This required a new CDL constant, 'NIL', that can be output from ncdump for such a string value in an HDF5 or netCDF-4 file. The ncgen utility was also modified to properly handle such NIL values for strings.

  https://bugtracking.unidata.ucar.edu/browse/NCF-56

• Parallel-build portability fixes, particularly for OpenMPI and gcc/gfortran-4.8.x on OSX.

• Fix contributed by Nath Gopalaswamy to large file problem reading netCDF classic or 64-bit offset files that have a UINT32_MAX flag for large last record size of a variable that has values larger than 1 byte. This problem had previously been fixed for writing such data, but was only tested with an ncbyte variable.

• Fixed various minor documentation problems.