This question is aimed at the members of the HDFGroup and also to the
community that uses the HDF5DotNet wrappers. I've seen a lot of traffic
lately on questions about functionality that does not exist in the
wrappers released with the initial release of HDF5 1.8.0. It has been
noted that these wrappers were funded by a customer who did not require
the full functionality. Therefore, not all of the functions exist.
There are several useful ones that are currently not included.
Additionally, it is clearly stated in the documentation that these
wrappers are a prototype and are not officially supported.
As a side project, I've been doing some work to the HDF5DotNet source
code to add some of these functions along with unit tests for the
library to make sure things are working. I personally did not like the
style in which the wrappers were written because it didn't conform to
the .NET standard method of capitalization and other things. So I have
updated my version of the library to change these things.
The question to the HDFGroup is this: what does the future hold for the
HDF5DotNet wrappers? Is it something that might officially become a
product that gets regular updates, or will it always just be the
prototype wrappers? The main reason I ask is because I would like to
see the ability to have a public source code repository where updates
could be made to the wrapper source code. Does the HDFGroup have a
Subversion repository that they would be willing to let the community
use so that we could develop the HDF5DotNet library further? Or as
another option, a public open source project site like Sourceforge could
be used for the same purpose. I'd be willing to use my source code as
the base because I prefer the styling. However, be aware that because
of the naming changes I've made that it wouldn't be a drop in
replacement to the current implementation of the HDF5DotNet wrapper.
I'd appreciate any feedback from the community and the HDFGroup on this
subject. It seems that there could be some progress made on improving
the library from the community, we just need a place for people to
contribute and/or access the latest code. I'd vote for creating a
Sourceforge project and going down that route, but I don't know if there
are any restrictions in place from the HDFGroup.
As a side note, there are some very minor modifications that could be
made to future versions of the header files that get released with the
HDF5 binaries that would greatly simplify updates to the HDF5DotNet
wrappers. It would not affect normal building of the HDF5 library
either. It would be really great if that could get included.
Regards,
Jesse
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