Jesse and All,
Sorry for the slow response. Many of us are on vacation or travel, and don't
have a chance to reply right away.
On Aug 4, 2010, at 7:41 PM, Jesse Lai wrote:
> 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?
Good question, and unfortunately at this moment, we do not have a straight
answer for you. Said this, we see how valuable .NET APIs are and would like to
take several steps (and have been taking already) to provide a better support
for the software:
1) .NET will be in SVN (read-only). We will announce it before September 1
after we finish internal testing.
2) We will be happy to accept patches, especially for the new APIs, bug fixes,
tests, and programming examples.
3) The most important factor for the .NET support is a regression testing with
the HDF5 code under development (both 1.8 branch and trunk). Our group
currently
doesn't have resources to do it and will need help from the HDF5 .NET
community. If .NET can be built with CMake, it will be a tremendous help.
4) With the CMake project, we set up an SVN branch with a write access for the
developers who worked with us. The check-ins were reviewed, tested and brought
into the mainstream code that became available with 1.8.5. We think this
model worked well and we may try to take a similar approach with .NET.
We (The HDF Group) will need to give more thought to 2-4 before moving forward.
Suggestions, comments are more than welcome.
Thank you!
Elena
> 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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