various

[Freddie Akeroyd]

Several points while i do a bit of catching up ...

The interface is provisionally set at "1.0.0", but i haven't officially
tagged it as such (and thus not added a "1.0.0" checkout option to the
WWW) - I'll wait until we have had a chance to check it works. You can
check out the code from http://sutekh.nd.rl.ac.uk/NeXus/

I've updated the interface to write "NeXus_version" every time a file
is opened "read/write", so it will always contain the latest version of
the interface that wrote to the file. I only set file_name and
file_time from NXopen for a new file - you can always get the current
value of these from e.g. a "DIR" and so i didn't see any reason to
update them on each access. I notice that NXUwriteglobals updates the
file_time - i guess the question is are we after "creation time" or
"modification time", or should we store both? Similarly should
"file_name" be the initial file name, or
anything-the-user-cares-to-set-it-to?

Are we storing times as "localtime" or "localtime+timezone offset" -
the WWW page would indicate "local+timezone offset", but the current
NXUwriteglobals just uses "localtime".  I also noticed that
NXUwriteglobals uses an "owner_" prefix for some globals e.g.
"owner_email", while the WWW page has just "email" - what are the
correct standard names?

Re: NXdict availability - it could easily be added to the distribution,
an either "hidden" in with the usual interface, or be a separate
optional build (and in a separate directory of the distribution). The
latter may be preferred as we are probably going to need to create
separate "test" and "examples" directories as the distribution grows
anyway. At the moment people build the "napi" object file and link this
into their programs - soon we will have to build a libNeXus.a and
provide a system installation kit

Re: making NXgetnextentry only return "NX*" names. We have two possible
solutions: (1) we make NXgetnextentry return only "NX*" names and
provide a separate function e.g. NXHgetnextentry for people who want to
look at general HDF files or (2) we add a "flags" argument to
NXgetnextentry to indicate what is required. I guess I would prefer (1)
for backward compatibility

Re: non-string attributes - you can only write string attributes from
FORTRAN at the moment, but I'll add in the other support soon

Regards,

Freddie

-- 
Freddie Akeroyd                        Email:  Freddie.Akeroyd at rl.ac.uk
ISIS Facility                          Tel:    +44 1235 445457
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory         Fax:    +44 1235 445720
Chilton, DIDCOT, OX11 OQX, GB          WWW:    http://www.isis.rl.ac.uk/