Past enhancements:
=================

Library
-------
- Removed these restrictions to accomodate users needs:
  + file's and hdf object's names are no longer limited to 64 characters
  + number of files can be opened at once is no longer limited to 32
    but up to system's allowing
- The Daily Test and Release process had been automated and improved
  remarkably.
- Over the years, through user reports and maintenance work, we have
  discovered past oversights that caused either corrupted data/files or
  unrecoverable data.  When users report problems, they typically just
  provide symptoms, that we investigate to determine the cause.  This
  process is often very time consuming, because the errors often occur
  only in limited circumstances.  Once, the problems are understood, and
  the fixes are made available, the damages, and, if possible, any
  repairing options must be made available to the users.  Then,
  documentation is updated to reflect the fixes and/or to explain the
  erroneous behavior for future reference.  This is an ongoing effort
  to support existing data and our long-time users.
- We added new and improved existing tests and examples in the library.
- User's Guide and Reference Manual were extensively updated and
  and their HTML version were produced.
- HDF supported platforms were adjusted as user demands and technologies
  change and grow over the years, including operating systems and compilers,
  such as Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Cygwin, Cmake, Automake and Autoconf
- External supporting libraries such as JPEG, GZIP, SZIP were also added
  and/or updated.
- New tools such as hrepack, hdiff, and hdfimport were added, as requested by users.
- Enabled netCDF support by default
- Many functions were added to the library in supporting of the HDF4 Mapping
  Project.  Most of these functions are to locate raw data of an HDF4
  object to help the effort of data preservation.  Due to the changes to
  the file format over the year, sometime, it was necessary to investigate
  and handle special situations.
- There are also some other new features such as checking for empty data
  set, getting compression and external file information, and getting data
  size for all type of datas, such as contiguous, compressed, and chunked.

Tools
-----

HDP
- New features:
  + option to keep the order in which the SDSs were specified at the command
    line (requested by Christopher Lynnes.)
  + options to enhance various output data format (one requested by Chris Lynnes afterward)
  + option to suppress printing attribute's data
  + option to print data in an interlace mode
  + improvement in displaying data information
	* display when IMCOMP compression is used
	* display the name of the external file in the error messages
	* display compression type used and compression ratio
- Re-designed the parsing process to correct the behavior of some flags
- Improved error handlings


Hdfimport
- Replaced all DFSD calls by SD interface throughout the tool, and
  factored out common code for maintainability.


Planned enhancements:
====================

- Todo items on library source code to improve its quality
  + Review and revise for consistency among different areas in the library
  + Reverse engineering for original intention, then document
  + Code factoring to improve reusability and maintainability

- Currenlty, there are a few issues reported or requested by NASA users in
  our bug database.
  + Implement integer 64-bit in HDF4
  + Verify the limitation of SD compression
  + Improve hdf2jpeg for supporting RI and RI8 images

- Enhancement works for tools such as hrepack, hdiff, hdfimport, and
  hdp to better help users to analize existing data.  These tasks include:
  + review for usability with inputs from users, then revise accordingly
  + review and revise for code reuse to improve maintainability
  + ensure sufficient tests with test plans
  + provide additional tutorials and examples
  + improve existing documentation or add missing ones, such as man pages


* mention about tools that hadn't been supported for years, are they still useful?
do they need to be supported, or improved?