The soft-links and hard-links are compelling, but I recommend not upgrading as I believe this again introduces API incompatibilities with yt. -Matt ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Andrew Collette <andrew.collette@gmail.com> Date: Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 1:45 PM Subject: HDF5 for Python (h5py) 1.3.0 beta To: h5py@googlegroups.com HDF5 for Python (h5py) 1.3.0 BETA ================================= I'm pleased to announce that HDF5 for Python 1.3 is now available!  This is a significant release introducing a number of new features, including support for soft/external links as well as object and region references. I encourage all interested HDF5/NumPy/Python users to give the beta a try and to do your best to break it. :)  Download, documentation and contact links are below. What is h5py? ------------- HDF5 for Python (h5py) is a general-purpose Python interface to the Hierarchical Data Format library, version 5.  HDF5 is a mature scientific software library originally developed at NCSA, designed for the fast, flexible storage of enormous amounts of data.

From a Python programmer's perspective, HDF5 provides a robust way to store data, organized by name in a tree-like fashion.  You can create datasets (arrays on disk) hundreds of gigabytes in size, and perform random-access I/O on desired sections.  Datasets are organized in a filesystem-like hierarchy using containers called "groups", and accesed using the tradional POSIX /path/to/resource syntax.

In addition to providing interoperability with existing HDF5 datasets and platforms, h5py is a convienient way to store and retrieve arbitrary NumPy data and metadata. HDF5 datasets and groups are presented as "array-like" and "dictionary-like" objects in order to make best use of existing experience.  For example, dataset I/O is done with NumPy-style slicing, and group access is via indexing with string keys.  Standard Python exceptions (KeyError, etc) are raised in response to underlying HDF5 errors. New features in 1.3 -------------------  - Full support for soft and external links  - Full support for object and region references, in all contexts (datasets,   attributes, etc).  Region references can be created using the standard   NumPy slicing syntax.  - A new get() method for HDF5 groups, which also allows the type of an   object or link to be queried without first opening it.  - Improved locking system which makes h5py faster in both multi-threaded and   single-threaded applications.  - Automatic creation of missing intermediate groups (HDF5 1.8)  - Anonymous group and dataset creation (HDF5 1.8)  - Option to enable cProfile support for the parts of h5py written in Cython  - Many bug fixes and performance enhancements Other changes -------------  - Old-style dictionary methods (listobjects, etc) will now issue   DeprecationWarning, and will be removed in 1.4.  - Dataset .value attribute is deprecated.  Use dataset[...] or dataset[()].  - new_vlen(), get_vlen(), new_enum() and get_enum() are deprecated in favor   of the functions h5py.special_dtype() and h5py.check_dtype(), which also   support reference types. Where to get it --------------- * Main website, documentation:  http://h5py.alfven.org * Downloads, bug tracker:       http://h5py.googlecode.com * Mailing list (discussion and development): h5py at googlegroups.com * Contact email: h5py at alfven.org Requires -------- * Linux, Mac OS-X or Windows * Python 2.5 or 2.6 * NumPy 1.0.3 or later * HDF5 1.6.5 or later (including 1.8); HDF5 is included with  the Windows version. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "h5py" group. To post to this group, send email to h5py@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to h5py+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/h5py?hl=en.