
$Id: NEWS 18445 2008-03-14 22:02:13Z jimg $

Version 3.7.8 (14 March 2008)

This version (3.7.8) contains a know problem when several SDSs use the same
name. This bug is encountered when a Vgroup contains a Vgroup and that inner
Vgroup contains an SDS, if that SDS's name matches the name of another SDS
nested in a *second set of objects with the same structure*, the 'first' SDS
will always be returned. This is ticket #905. Since this version of the
handler fixes a number of other problems, and this bug affects only a smal
number of data sets, we're releasing this version now and will release an
update in a few weeks. It's likely that this bug has been present for some
time if not since the handler was first written.

OS/X Build improved.

Many fixes, Escpecially in the error/exception processing software.

Works with BES 3.6.0 (and thus as part of Hyrax 1.4).

Version 3.7.7 (14 Nov 2007)

pkg and rpm build fixes

Version 3.7.6 (14 Nov 2007)

Don't edit bes.conf during make install, but document the bes-hdf4-dap.sh
script and the bes-conf make target in README.

pkg-config support added

Various bug fixes.

Version 3.7.6 (?)

Don't edit bes.conf during make install, but document the bes-hdf4-dap.sh
script and the bes-conf make target in README.

Version 3.7.6 (?)

Don't edit bes.conf during make install, but document the bes-hdf4-dap.sh
script and the bes-conf make target in README.

Version 3.7.6 (?)

Don't edit bes.conf during make install, but document the bes-hdf4-dap.sh
script and the bes-conf make target in README.

Version 3.7.5 (13 March 2007)

Added automatic configuration of the handler using 'make install.' Now the
handler is automatically configured in the bes.conf file in the default
location. Test data are also installed, so after installing this handler
Hyrax will have data to serve providing an easy way to test your new install
and to see how the a working bes.conf should look. To use this, make sure
that you first install the bes, and that dap-server gets intalled too.
Finally, every time you install or reinstall handlers, make sure to restart
the BES and OLFS.

Version 3.7.4

Build fixes.

Added test data.

Version 3.7.3

Updates for the 1.4 release of Server 4. Also included are bug fixes, memory
leak fixes, and performance enhencements.

Version 3.7.2

Now builds and works on OS/X

Now works with the netcdf handler.

Now the handler name is set inthe BES, not hardcoded here.

Now builds as a (libtool) module

Version 3.7.1

Build fixes (now finds the BES using the same logic as the netcdf and
freeform handlers).

The hdfclass library is shared, not static to avoid a warning about potential
incompatibilities. 

Fixes to the help response.

Removed an extraneous directory.

Version 3.7.0

The handler now builds with BES 3.1. The build makes a Server3 executable
(but has not been tested) and a Server4 shared object module.

If the HDF4 handler's cache directory is not passed to the handler, the
default  is now to not cache the files. The old behavior was to throwing an
exception. 

Version 3.6.1

The handler has never been very good about situations where the cache
directory is bad or missing. That is, if the handler was not told where to
write files it caches, it was writing them in same directory that holds the
data. The problem with this is/was that the server often does not have write
access to that directory. Furtermore, the server always cached parts of some
responses, even if built with the NO_CACHE compile-time option. Bummer. This,
combined with the first problem meant that a misconfigured server would often
crash (and return a particularly inscrutable error message as well). This has
been fixed. The server now checks to see if the cache directory is writable
and defaults to not caching DAS and DDS objects when caching won't work. This
does degrade the performance of the server, so an error message is written to
the httpd error log.

Version 3.6.0

Due to a fix in the handling of HDFEOS files, this handler requires at least
libdap 3.6.0.

Version 3.5.0

This handler can return the DDX response (which is an experimental feature,
not to be relied upon).

This version of the software has been converted to work with the 3.5.x version
of the OPeNDAP data server.

It uses automake and includes a spec file that can be used to build RPM
packages.

Some of the test files have been modified because they included images 
compressed using a lossy algorithm (JPEG). It's hard to verify that the 
values in the files are correct, so I've removed those from the files.

Known problems:

An issue with HDF 4.2r1 and earlier versions of HDF4 has been discovered. In
some cases a file written using an older vesion of HDF4 that contains CHAR8
or UCHAR8 SDSs may not be correctly represented as a DAP2 Grid. Instead it
show up as an Array.

Bug #61: Vlens (which are one-dimensional arrays with an undeclared length
and cannot be subsampled) appear as Sequences. In version 3.4 access to
these using the [] array access notation was broken. Requesting [0:4] returned 
the first four elements, not the first five. That problem has been fixed, but
the larger issue of representing vlens as sequences has not. 

Bug #71: The dot (.) character is 'overloaded' in that it can be both a 
separater and a regular character in an identifier. If a Structure name 
contains a dot, trying to access a field using 'name.field' breaks since
'name' contians a dot itself and the parser thinks it's a separator. The 
fix for this will be introduced in DAP3. Until then, use the shorthand 
variable referencing notation where a field is requested using the
unqualified field name.
