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                            Newsletter #126
                           February 15, 2012 

CONTENTS
. Release of HDF 4.2.7
. Release of H4toH5 Conversion Library and Tools Version 2.2.1
. Changes to Windows Support in HDF4 and H4toH5 Conversion Library
  and Tools 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Release of HDF 4.2.7
====================

The release of HDF 4.2.7 is now available. It can be obtained from
the HDF Downloads page:

   http://www.hdfgroup.org/downloads/index.html#hdf4

For the HDF 4.2.7 documentation, see:

   http://www.hdfgroup.org/doc.html

Important new features and changes in this release include:

 o VSgetexternalfile and SDgetexternalfile were superseded by
   VSgetexternalinfo and SDgetexternalinfo because their prototypes were
   missing the parameter "length" for the external data length.

 o This release adds support for building HDF (HDF4) using CMake 2.8.6
   (see http://www.cmake.org/).

   This is the first step in supporting CMake in HDF4. Initial work targets
   building on Windows only, but CMake can be used on other platforms, as
   well. Please refer to the ./release_notes/CMake.txt file in the source
   code for more details on building HDF4 with CMake.
  
 o The Fortran wrappers vfgvgroups and vsfgvdatas have been added for
   Vgetvgroups and VSgetvdatas, respectively.

 o Support was added for IBM XL Fortran for Linux 64-bit and Linux 
   PowerPC 64 Version 13.1.

 o Numerous bug fixes were made.

Please be sure to see the HDF 4.2.7 Release Notes for complete details on
what has changed in this release:

   http://www.hdfgroup.org/ftp/HDF/HDF_Current/src/hdf-4.2.7-RELEASE.txt



Release of H4toH5 Conversion Library and Tools Version 2.2.1
============================================================

Version 2.2.1 of the H4toH5 Conversion Library and Tools is now
available. This release has been tested with HDF5-1.8.8 and HDF 4.2.7.
See the conversion library and tools web page for complete details
regarding this release:

   http://www.hdfgroup.org/h4toh5/

The software can be obtained from the conversion library and tools
web page, as well as the HDF Downloads page:

   http://www.hdfgroup.org/downloads/index.html#h4h5

The conversion software consists of command-line utilities (h4toh5,
h5toh4) as well as a conversion library for converting individual
HDF4 objects to HDF5 objects.

Important new features and changes in this release include:

 o The source code has been changed to use the HDF5 v1.8 API. This means
   when using HDF5 v1.8 to build the library and tools, one no longer
   needs to and should not use CPPFLAGS=-DH5_USE_16_API.

 o The -nc4 and -nc4fakedim options for converting HDF-EOS2 to netCDF-4
   are not supported in version 2.2.1, but may be supported again in a
   future release.

 o Support was added for Linux 2.6 PowerPC 64, using GCC v4.4.6.



Changes to Windows Support in HDF4 and H4toH5 Conversion Library and Tools 
==========================================================================

The next release of both the HDF4 library and H4toH5 conversion software
will include changes to how Windows is supported.

CMake will be used exclusively to build the Windows libraries and
executables. The windows/ directory will no longer be included in the
source code, which means the VS 2008 project files will no longer be
provided.

CMake is a cross-platform build system generator. Projects specify their
build process with platform-independent CMake listfiles. These are
included in each directory of a source tree with the name CMakeLists.txt.
Users build a project by using CMake to generate a build system for a
native tool on their platform.

More information on CMake can be found at the KitWare site:

   http://www.cmake.org/

We are also moving our Windows reference platforms to Windows 7 using
Visual Studio 2010 and Intel Fortran 12.


-------------------------------------------------------------
For questions regarding these or other HDF issues, contact:

   help@hdfgroup.org