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

[Hendy Sumanto]

>>I have committed in the last few weeks a number of improvements to the
>>netcdf driver in trunk (1.9).
Well done, Etienne. Thanks for all the work.

>>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.
I will be giving the latest version a try and test some of the highlights.

>>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!
>>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
They all are good improvements to the current driver so it would be good to see all of them
to make their to the stable version.

Thanks,

Hendy