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> Russ suggested Thursday this week for a telcon. Is anyone else
> available?
Anytime Thursday is fine for me.
Quincey
>
> I have updated the status report I sent Friday. Quincey gave me more
> info.
> on the last two items, group/indexing and UTF-8.
>
> On 2005.04.29 10:29 Robert E. McGrath wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > I think we planned to have a telcon pretty soon, to synch up the
> > netcdf4/hdf5
> > activities. I would think the agenda is mainly updates.
> >
> > Mike et al. visited NASA last week, and there has been a lot of work
> > done.
> >
> > I attach below a summary of big items from HDF. (This is my version,
> > I
> > hope I got things more or less correct.)
> >
> > --REMcG
> >
> >
> > Status (also at http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/RFC/netCDF4/nc4status.txt)
> > ++++++
> >
> Reviewing my mail for the last few weeks, I have 4 major items from HDF:
>
> 1. Draft proposal for configuration/build
> 2. Parallel test plan
> 3. Discussions of group and indexing features and plans
> 4. Discussions of unicode
> Here is my summary
>
> Draft proposal: "A Roadmap for Implementing NetCDF4 Configure/build"
> ============
> (March 30, 2005)
> See the document:
> http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/RFC/netCDF4/nc4-conf.pdf
>
> Status: I think this document represents the consensus of the
> project.
> At some point, it will be important to publish something.
>
> Parallel test plan and test status
> =================================
> "Ideas for Testing Parallel NetCDF-4" (April 12, 2005, revised
> April 28, 2005)
> See the document:
> http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/RFC/netCDF4/par-tests-revised.pdf
> (Note: see the _revised_ plan on page 3-4)
>
> Status: This work is in progress.
>
> Discussion of Group Indexes
> ==========================
>
> 1. Plan
>
> * For feature freeze: implement new API with old index internally *
> Reimplement with new structures for the release
>
> The files created in this period may be incompatible with the released
> library.
>
> 2. Design
>
> Multiple options for what will stored for each link (i.e., the index
> in a group):
> - Name (indexable, must be unique, modifiable)
> - Creation time (indexable, may be non-unique, modifiable)
> - Creation order (indexable, unique, monotonicly increasing,
> non-modifiable)
> - Character set (i.e. ASCII, UTF-8, etc.) (non-indexable?,
> non-unique, modifiable)
> - Object address/link target (for hard/soft links) (non-indexable,
> may be
> non-unique (for multiple links to same object), modifiable?)
>
> Applications can determine which of the three indexable fields
> they'd like
> to have an index maintained for with a group creation property.
> They will
> choose an index for iteration, etc. with a group access property.
>
> Additional requirements have been proposed:
> * No current API will change, all existing programs work without
> change.
> * No matter what index is selected at create time it must be
> possible to
> iterate by name, and this must be the default behavior.
> I gather that these requirements may not be fully met, but no details
> are available at this time.
>
> Discussions of Unicode
> =====================
>
> Unidata requested support for Unicode, at least for object (and
> attribute?) names. This was limited to UTF-8 support for now.
>
> Action:
> An RFC is being prepared
> Summary of approach:
>
> HDF should be able to accept UTF-8 encoded file names, object names,
> attribute names and strings as a datatype. We are running tests
> to verify this.
>
> Add several small features to the library to allow the file
> to have better self-description information about UTF-8 strings:
> - A field in the link to an object that describes the character
> set encoding used for the name
> - Some metadata on attributes describing the character set
> encoding used for the name
> - A new character set encoding type for string datatypes.
>
> Details will be presented in an RFC, RSN
>
