test release of PnetCDF 1.7.0.pre1

[Wei-keng Liao]

Hello to the PnetCDF community,

The release candidate of 1.7.0 is now available. We are sincerely soliciting
feedbacks from the PnetCDF community for this test release. The tar balls can
be downloaded from:
http://cucis.ece.northwestern.edu/projects/PnetCDF/download.html

Below is a brief list of noticeable changes.

  o New features
    * Nonblocking requests now can be posted in the define mode.

  o New run-time environment variables
    * PNETCDF_VERBOSE_DEBUG_MODE environment variable can be used to print the
      location in the source code where the error code is originated.

  o New utility program
    * ncoffsets reports the file offset information, including the starting and
      ending file offsets, of variables stored in a netCDF file.

  o Semantics updates
    * All nonblocking APIs now take a NULL pointer for the request ID argument,
      meaning users do not wish to keep track of the request ID. If NULL
      request IDs are used, NC_REQ_ALL should be used when calling
      ncmpi_wait_all/ncmpi_wait to commit all the pending nonblocking requests.
      This feature relinquishes users from the responsibility of tracking the
      IDs of pending requests.


Wei-keng Liao