[Nexus-developers] NAPI 3.0 beta projected release - May 20, 2005

[Nick Maliszewskyj]

Greetings,

As part of the NIAC meeting held recently in Santa Fe, NM,
some of the members of the development team gathered to
discuss issues related to a prospective new release of the
NeXus API.

We agreed that the new release tag would be 3.0 beta. Changes
from the 2.0 API include:
    XML support (using the mxml packages)
    NXU utility API (implemented in C)
    NXOpenPath()
    NXOpenGroupPath()
    NXOpenSourceGroup()
    NX_BINARY definition

In bulleted fashion, the set of acceptance tests would involved
applications or a test suite that would:
    1) Read all existing example files (XML, HDF4, HDF5)
       and compare (some) read items against what we know the
       data to be
    2) Write a test file
    3) Read the test file and compare what we read against
       what we just wrote
    4) Perform all of the above on all supported platforms
          - Win32, Linux (distributions?), UNIX, MacOS X

In ad hoc fashion we established a release date of May 20, 2005
for the 3.0beta. The question I have for subscribers to this list
is whether this is reasonable and what do we know needs to be fixed
before it goes public.

Next week I can begin some of the testing of what we have under
CVS in preparation for packaging sources for release (or prerelease,
if we call this a beta). I'll gladly do some testing on RedHat
9.0, Fedora, and RHEL in preparation. If anyone else is available
to lend a hand, please chime in.

Thanks for your attention.

Nick

-- 
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o Dr. Nicholas C. Maliszewskyj
o Center for Neutron Research
o National Institute of Standards & Technology
o 100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8562
o Gaithersburg MD 20899-8562
o nickm at nist.gov     Phone: (301)975-3171    Fax: (301)921-9847
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