pre-release of PnetCDF 1.9.0

[Wei-keng Liao]

Hello to the PnetCDF community,

We are pleased to announce the preview release of PnetCDF 1.9.0,
parallel-netcdf-1.9.0.pre1, is now available for download.
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.
1. PnetCDF has migrated to use automake and libtool.
2. Support shared libraries. (ABI version starts from 1:0:0).
3. NC_MAX_VAR_DIMS, NC_MAX_DIMS, NC_MAX_ATTRS, NC_MAX_VARS have been
   lift to NC_MAX_INT for all classic formats
4. Improved support for fill mode
5. Support ARM architecture
6. Update UTF8 encoding to use utf8proc v2.1.0 from the Julia Language project
7. Build recipe for Unbuntu
8. Address issues/bugs caused by MPI libraries (OpenMPI an MVAPICH)

Please note this is the first release of PnetCDF that officially supports
shared libraries. Problems may occur during the building and linking stages.
As always, please report problems encountered to this mailing list.

Detailed changes made since 1.8.1 are listed in
http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/parallel-netcdf/browser/tags/v1-9-0-pre1/sneak_peek

best

Wei-keng Liao