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Now we wait for any bugs to be reported...

It is always a tremendous amount of effort to make a netCDF release. There are so many people depending on it, and I really don't want to mess up up.

The 4.1 release, which I did last Friday, was my sixth netCDF release. This release has a lot of new features - more than usual, since we have had more than the usual number of programmers working on netCDF. It hasn't been just me and (part-time) Russ, as in previous releases. This is the first release that contains work from Dennis, and what a large piece of work it does contain: the new opendap client.

In addition, the 4.1 release contains a new utility, nccopy, which copies netCDF files, changing format on the way if desired. (Russ did nccopy). There is also a new ncgen, finally up to speed on all netCDF-4 extensions, which Dennis did.

As for me, I put in a layer that can read (many but not all) HDF4 files, a layer that can use parallel-netcdf for parallel I/O to classic/64-bit offset files, a modification to allow most existing HDF5 data files to be read by netCDF. Finally, and at the last minute, I changed the default settings of caching and chunking so that the users producing the giant AR-5 datasets would get good performance. Also, I added the nc-config utility to help users come up with correct compiler flags when building netCDF programs, and two new libraries are part of the distribution, UDUNITS (Steve Emmerson) and libcf (yours truly).

Probably we should have released 6 months ago, and held some of those features back for another release. The more new features, the harder it is to test and release.

But it's out now, and we have started working on release 4.2. For that release we have more limited ambitions, and I hope it will be out this year.