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

[Ray Osborn]

On 2005/05/12 20:09, "Nick Maliszewskyj" <nickm at nist.gov> wrote:

> 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.

Nick,
I'm a little concerned about the next release being labelled beta.  That
would mean that people would have to choose between the latest official
release, 2.0, which would still be broken, and a beta release.  If we have a
release that passes the test suite on all the tested systems, can we not
just label it 3.0.  Otherwise, I think we should release 2.1 without the XML
API.

> 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.

Freddie and I have been testing the Mac OS X version, and it nearly works.
There is an anomaly with writing the XML files.  The API appears to
construct the header <?xml...> tag by treating it as a regular tag - the
true root of the file - even though it's not a conventional XML tag.  It
does not require a closing tag, and yet should be completed with ?>, not />.
The result comes out as:

<?xml
version="1.0">

Because the header is malformed, the resulting NXtest.xml cannot be read by
NXbrowse, even though the latter will read the XML file created by NXtoXML,
e.g., from NXtest.h5, without any problem.

I think this bug applies to the Linux version as well.  I'm not sure whether
it's a problem in mxml v2.2, or the NAPI.

If this can be fixed by May 20, the regular API seems to be in reasonable
shape.

Best regards, 
Ray
-- 
Dr Ray Osborn                Tel: +1 (630) 252-9011
Materials Science Division   Fax: +1 (630) 252-7777
Argonne National Laboratory  E-mail: ROsborn at anl.gov
Argonne, IL 60439-4845