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                            Newsletter #105
                            February 3, 2009 

CONTENTS

 - Release of HDF 4.2r4
 - Release of H4 to H5 Version 2.1
 - Dropping VS 6.0

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

Release of HDF 4.2r4
====================

We are pleased to announce the release of HDF 4.2r4.
It can be downloaded from the following location:

   http://www.hdfgroup.org/release4/obtain.html

The HDF4 home page is located at:

   http://www.hdfgroup.org/products/hdf4/index.html

The RELEASE.txt file in the source code contains
detailed information about this release:

   http://www.hdfgroup.org/ftp/HDF/HDF_Current/src/RELEASE-4.2r4.txt

New Features and Changes in HDF 4.2r4 include:

 o A new API, SDgetdatasize, was added to retrieve the compressed
   and original sizes of an SDs' data.

 o Several new SD Fortran APIs were added.

 o The hdp and hrepack utilities can now display more compression
   information.

 o The configuration was upgraded to support Automake 1.10.1,
   Autoconf 2.61 and Libtool 2.2.6a.
    
 o Several new platforms and compilers are supported:

    - Linux 2.6 x86_64 for Fedora 10, Ubuntu 8.10, and OpenSuse 11.1
      with GNU C and gfortran.

    - Mac Intel with GNU C, gfortran, g95, and Intel 10.1 32-bit
      compilers.
   
 o There were several bug fixes, including the incorrect HDF library
   behavior exposed by applications working with netCDF files.

Please refer to the RELEASE.txt file for a comprehensive list of
changes in this release.


Release of H4 to H5 Version 2.1
===============================

A new version of the H4 to H5 software, version 2.1,
is now available.  This version was built with HDF5 1.8.2
and HDF 4.2r4.

Numerous enhancements and bug fixes have been added to this
release, most of which are related to converting HDF-EOS2 files to
HDF5 files that can be read by the netCDF-4 APIs. More information can
be found in the RELEASE.txt file in the release_docs/ directory of the
h4h5tools source code distribution.

An optional "verify" tool has also been provided to enable applications
that convert HDF-EOS2 files to netCDF-4 files to verify the correctness
of the converted results.

The H4 to H5 software can be downloaded from:

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


Dropping VS 6.0
===============

We will be dropping Visual Studio 6.0 for both HDF4 and HDF5 1.6
products, after the HDF 4.2r4 release.





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

   help@hdfgroup.org