[gdal-dev] Announcing significant changs to the netcdf driver

[Etienne Tourigny]

Hi all

I have committed in the last few weeks a number of improvements to the
netcdf driver in trunk (1.9).

I would appreciate if users of the driver would try the latest version
(via svn or nightlies) and see if there are any bugs or regressions
and perhaps give some suggestions and feedback.
You can answer here and/or add to http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/ticket/4294

I would like to add many of these fixes and features to the stable 1.8
series, but new features cannot be added there without explicit
permission of the PSC or an RFC (as per RFC 3).
If anyone would wish that to happen, please express yourself!

The user docs have been updated (section Driver Improvements)
http://www.gdal.org/frmt_netcdf.html

Highlights are:

- Added support for NC2, NC4 and NC4C file types for reading and
writing, and HDF4 for reading. See NetCDF File Format for details.
- Improved support for CF-1.5 projected and geographic SRS reading and writing
- Improvements to metadata (global and variable) handling
- Added simple progress indicator
- Added support for DEFLATE compression (reading and writing) and szip
(reading) - requires NetCDF-4 support
- Added support for valid_range/valid_min/valid_max
- Proper handling of signed/unsigned byte data
- Added support for Create() function - enables to use netcdf directly
with gdalwarp

Regards,
Etienne