[Numpy-discussion] Home for pyhdf5io?

[Eric Firing]

Francesc Alted wrote:
> A Monday 25 May 2009 00:31:43 David Warde-Farley escrigué:
>> As Robert's design document for the NPY format says, one option would
>> be to implement a minimal subset of the HDF5 protocol *from scratch*
>> (that would be required for saving NumPy arrays as top-level leaf
>> nodes, for example). This would also sidestep any tricky licensing
>> issues (I don't know what the HDF5 license is in particular, I know
>> it's fairly permissive but still might not be suitable for including
>> any of it in NumPy).
> 
> The license for HDF5 is BSD-based and apparently permissive enough, as can be 
> seen in:
> 
> http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/doc/Copyright.html
> 
> The problem is to select such a desired minimal protocol subset. In addition, 
> this implementation may require quite a bit of work (but I've never had an in-
> deep look at the guts of the HDF5 library, so I may be wrong).
> 
> Cheers,
> 

If the aim is to come up with a method of saving numpy arrays that uses 
a standard protocol and does not introduce large dependencies, then 
could this be accomplished using netcdf instead of hdf5, specifically 
Roberto De Almeida's pupynere, which is already in scipy.io as 
netcdf.py?  Or does hdf5 have essential characteristics for this purpose 
that netcdf lacks?

Eric