test release: parallel-netcdf 1.4.0pre1

[Wei-keng Liao]

Hello to our PnetCDF community,

On behalf of the entire PnetCDF team at Northwestern U. and Argonne
National Lab., I am happy to announce the test release of 1.4.0.pre1.

There have been several noticeable new features and performance
enhancements added since the previous release 1.3.1 back in
September 2012. We are sincerely soliciting feedbacks from the
PnetCDF community for this test release. We plan to release 1.4.0
in 1-2 weeks.

Here is a list of noticeable changes:

- Fortran 90 APIs (function overloading)
- new varn APIs for reading/writing a list of requests to a
  single variable
- PNETCDF_SAFE_MODE run-time environment variable enables/disables
  the data/argument consistency checking
- New example programs in C, F77, and F90
- New I/O benchmark programs
- Improved request aggregation
- Improved build process - configure can now detect MPI compilers
  and compile flags


For more information, including download or SVN links, please see the
release notes:
https://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/parallel-netcdf/wiki/ReleaseNotes-1.4.0.pre1



Wei-keng Liao