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Re: Status (fwd)

Jim,

> I haven't seen any updates on the development of NetCDF 4. Are you
> still planning on releasing version 4.0.0 this month? Thanks for
> any info,

Did you see the reply I posted on July 14 to your question on the
netcdf-hdf mailing list about the status of netCDF-4?  In case you
didn't, I forwarded a copy below.  We'll likely get a beta release
out either this month or next, depending on problems encountered in
testing on lots of platforms.  One of the things we're testing is a
new build system that is supposed to be more automatic (rarely any
need to set environment variables), but if something goes wrong it's
more complicated to diagnose and fix the problem than with our
previous approach.

--Russ

------- Forwarded Message

Date:    Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:02:47 -0600
From:    Russ Rew <address@hidden>
To:      address@hidden
Subject: Re: Status 

Hi Jim,

> I'm curious what the progress has been on the NetCDF-4/HDF merge project. I
> am anxious to try it out as soon as possible. But basically I'd like to know
> what the development and release schedule is. Thanks,

We're scheduled to present our final review to NASA for the project in
August.

The software has been available in alpha release form for a while, and
we continue to update that frequently, but the alpha release needs
more testing and release engineering before a beta release will be
ready.  The beta release will also get rid of artifacts in the alpha
release format that are just placeholders for new HDF5 enhancements,
such as dimension scales.  The HDF5 enhancements we depend on are
available in an HDF5 development snapshot but not yet in a general
HDF5 release.

So if you choose to try testing with the alpha release, you should be
warned that the beta and subsequent releases will not support reading
files created by the alpha release that contain these development
artifacts.

The development and release schedules are available from:

  http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/netcdf/netcdf-4/devplan.html

and

  http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/software/netcdf/release_schedule.html

and you will note from those plans that we're close to being on
schedule, but the beta release has been delayed due to a few
unanticipated problems, dependencies with the next HDF5 release, and
the need for work on ncdump and ncgen utilities that wasn't included
in the original proposal.  We'll update the online schedule soon.

--Russ

------- End of Forwarded Message