netCDF operators NCO 2.8.4 available, important bugfix

• To: NCO Annnounce <nco-announce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
• Subject: netCDF operators NCO 2.8.4 available, important bugfix
• From: Charlie Zender <zender@xxxxxxx>
• Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 13:22:26 -0800

Hi,

The netCDF operators NCO version 2.8.4 are ready. 

http://nco.sf.net (Homepage)
http://dust.ess.uci.edu/nco (Homepage "mirror")

This release fixes index-based hyperslabbing which broke in 2.7.3.
This nasty bug caused index-based hyperslabs, e.g., -d lat,1, to
behave like value-based hyperslabs, e.g., -d lat,1.0 under some
conditions. 
Unfortunately, the incorrect answers generated may be hard to notice!
_Versions 2.7.3--2.8.3 are buggy and should be upgraded ASAP_.
Re-do any data-processing that used index-based hyperslabbing with
these versions of NCO.

Thanks to Mike Page for reporting the bug and to Rorik for fixing it.

User's of ncap and AMD Opteron owners will notice other improvements.

Enjoy,
Charlie

Bug-fixes:
1. Index-based hyperslabbing works again (broke in 2.7.3)

Feature changes:
1. Build support for AMD Opteron. 
Compile netCDF with CFLAGS='-fPIC' or link fails.

Other user-visible changes:
1. Better memory related diagnostics
2. Detail ncap memory usage in manual

User-invisible changes:
1. Test suite rewritten in perl (nco_tst.pl). Gracias Rorik.
2. Reduced peak ncap memory usage to 2*sizeof(var) in binary
   operations (merci beaucoups, Henri).

-- 
Charlie Zender, zender at uci dot edu, (949) 824-2987, Department of
Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine CA 92697-3100