HDF Newsletter 21 July 19, 1996 CONTENTS . HDF 4.0r2 release - New Features and Changes - Changes in Compiling the Source Code - Platforms Tested - 16-bit support removed - Known Problems . HDF Documentation . HDF Staff Update HDF 4.0r2 release ------------------- HDF 4.0 release 2 is now available on the NCSA anonymous ftp server (ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu; HDF/HDF4.0r2/) 1. New Features and Changes o HDF now supports an unlimited number of access IDs and files IDs. o The vdata field size limit has been increased from 32000 to 65535. o The hdp utility has been updated to: - view a GR object - recognize the new compression methods - view descriptive annotations - display the library version of the HDF file o SDsetattr and GRsetattr now check for both MAX_ORDER and MAX_FIELD_SIZE. o The handling of DFNT_CHAR in all Fortran interfaces has been cleaned up. See release_notes/Fortran_APIs.txt for more information. o When appending compressed data onto the end of an unlimited dimension SDS, the SD interface no longer writes the fill-values in locations where they will immediately be over-written by data. This was done for the compression layer, but has the added enhancement of improving performance. o On the Cray, there were boundary problems when foreign data did not start from the 64-bit boundary. This has been fixed. o There are no longer the following name collisions with the HDF libraries: - AVS (HPread, HPwrite) - Windows SDK (_hread) - ODL library (_HDF_) o The 32-bit mode for IRIX 6.1 previously used the '-32' option which produces mips1 code. It has been changed to use '-n32' which produces mips4 code. This runs faster on the Power Challenges. Users who must use the '-32' option can link their code with the IRIX 5.3 HDF library. o The compression problems have been fixed when using HDF on IRIX 6.1 with the -n32 (see Known Problems below). o The zlib and jpeg libraries have been updated. The versions included with HDF 4.0 Release 2 are: zlib version 1.0.2 jpeg version 6a (7-Feb-96) o The hdfls utility has been updated to: - support the new compression modes - display the library version of the HDF file o The directories separator in the directory variable used by the function HXsetdir (Fortran equivalent: hxsdir) is the vertical bar ('|') now. It used to be the colon (':') symbol, but a colon is a legal symbol for a file pathname in the MacOS system. o The code has been rearranged so that most applications' binaries will be smaller. o A new routine, VSfpack(), has been added. Please see the HDF man page on how to use this routine. o A new routine, GRluttoref(), has been added. Please see the HDF man page on how to use this routine. o Several internal problems have been fixed with the GR interface. 2. Changes in Compiling the Source Code: o A new compile option, '-DHAVE_NETCDF', has been added, to avoid conflicts in linking the HDF/MFHDF library with the original netCDF library. We added this option because some users need to access Unidata's official version of the netCDF library rather than the version that was merged with HDF. This is only available for the C-interface. However, if you choose this option, keep in mind that you cannot read/write HDF files using the netCDF libraries. See section 2.4.3.2 in the INSTALL file for more information. o When compiling and installing HDF, the default location to place the binaries, has been changed from /usr/local/bin to NewHDF in the source directory. For example, assuming the library source is loaded at /usr/local/src/hdf, the following commands will result in the HDF binaries being placed in the directory /usr/local/src/hdf/dev/NewHDF. cd dev ./configure -v make make test make install o The Fortran test output has been cleaned up and shortened, when running "make test". Previously, the Fortran tests on the hdf/ side consisted of multiple Fortran programs invoked by a C frontend. The test programs were changed to subroutines and combined as one Fortran program. The C frontend was also changed to produce a 'directive' file, called fortest.arg, which contains directives to run the Fortran test program. 3. Platforms Tested HDF 4.0r2 has been tested on the following platforms: Sun4(SunOS 4.1.3) DEC Alpha/Digital Unix v3.2 Sun4(Solaris 2.4) DEC Alpha/OpenVMS AXP v6.2 Sun4(Solaris 2.5) Fujitsu UXP/M-1800(SYS_V-4.0) SGI-Indy(IRIX5.3) IBM PC - Intel Pentium SGI-Indy(IRIX6.1_n32) Solarisx86 SGI-Indy(IRIX6.1_64) Linux(a.out) v1.2.4 HP9000/735(HPUX 9.03) Linux(elf) 1.2.13 Exemplar(HPUX 9.03) FreeBSD 2.0 Cray C90 (UNICOS 803.2) PowerPC(Mac-OS-7.5) Cray YMP (UNICOS 803.2) 68k-far/4i/8d(Mac-OS-7.5) CM5 (Parallel I/O, 4.1.3_U1) Windows NT/95 IBM RS6000/AIX v4.1 T3D (v9.0.lai) IBM SP2 (single node, v4.1) VAX/VMS 4. 16-bit support removed o Support for the 16-bit architecture has been pulled out of HDF. 5. Known Problems o On the SunOS platform, there is a bug when using sfscal()/sfgcal() routines with gcc and f77. o On the VMS platform, there is a bug with float64 data. o For IRIX 6.1, the stdio.h file gives a false warning message if both the '-n32' and '-ansi' options are used for the C compiler. We have temporarily removed the '-ansi' option from our autoconfiguration for the Irix6_32 system, to avoid these messages. We have verified that the culprit in stdio.h has been corrected in IRIX 6.2, and plan to put the '-ansi' option back in our next release. o The compression tests produce errors for FLOAT32 data if the '-O' option is used on IRIX 6.1, for both the '-64' bit and '-n32' bit modes. It did not produce errors when using the '-32' bit option or when not using the '-O' option. We are unsure whether the errors are due to the compression code or the IRIX C optimizer. For now, we have chosen to compile the HDF library without the '-O' option, while we investigate the problem. HDF Documentation ----------------- The HDF 4.0 User's Guide has been updated and is available on the NCSA ftp server in: HDF/Documentation/HDF4.0r2/Users_Guide/. The HDF 4.0 Reference Manual is now available on the ftp server in: HDF/Documentation/HDF4.0r2/Ref_Manual/. Compressed versions of the files located in the 'Users_Guide' and 'Ref_Manual' directories are available in the subdirectory: HDF/Documentation/HDF4.0r2/Compressed_Files/. We are working on more documentation, including a new Getting started manual and a new HDF Specification and Developer's Guide. We will announce the availability of these documents as they are completed. HDF Staff Update ----------------- Don Gibson recently completed his M.B.A. degree at University of Illinois and has moved on to a position at Sears Company as a Programmer. Don has proven to be a great asset to the HDF group, assisting in project management and business planning (as well as sprucing up the HDF home page!) We will miss Don and wish him much success in his endeavors.