[Nexus-developers] NAPI state & misc

[Mark Koennecke]

High,

As you might have seen from the cvs messages I changed the type string 
in the XML-API to NAPItype and
suppressed this attribute. Thus nobody gets surprised anymore (High 
Peter!). Actually the name of the
attribute is now a define in nxio.h, so we can swap it easily the next 
time round.

I also found a subtle and easily resolvable issue with our test cases. 
This is now on the new bugzilla.
Thanks Freddy for setting this up so quickly!
The trouble is that the test program was compiled without -DHDF5 on the 
compile line even if HDF5
was active. This made the compiler believe that sizeof(NXlink) is 1032 
in napi_test.c and 4104 in the
NAPI (which was compiled  with the flag). This in turn caused a memory 
overwrite on the stack. Such
a thing can cause random and OS dependent problems, just as we were 
experiencing with the tests.
Freddy: check if  your HDF5 issue persists when this has been addressed.

There are two solutions to this:
- Fix the autogenerated Makefile
- Remove the ifdef HDF5 in the NXlink structure in napi.h.
I prefer the later because it removes a cause for subtle bugs. Though at 
the expense of carrying
another 3072 bytes in the NXlink structure we do not need in XML of HDF4 
cases.

What do you think?

Concerning 2.1: I would second Nick's opinion that we should only do it 
if can be done without
much work. I also see no problem in releasing 3.0, with the annotation 
in the RELEASE file that
XML support is still beta. In order to stabilise XML we need bug reports.

                                             Regards,

                                                            Mark