[petsc-dev] need for HDF5 < 1.8.0 support?

[Jed Brown]

"Smith, Barry F." <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

>   A potential drawback is some users also use HDF5 directly in their code and may be using an older version (people are very slow to change).

The HDF5 developers were very deliberate about this.  You can still use
the old API in your own code while linking to the new library.  See
H5_USE_16_API.

https://support.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/doc/RM/APICompatMacros.html