What's new in h5py 2.6
======================

Support for HDF5 Virtual Dataset API
------------------------------------
Initial support for the HDF5 Virtual Dataset API, which was introduced in
HDF5 1.10, was added to the low-level API. Ideas and input for how this should
work as part of the high-level interface are welcome.

This work was added in `#663`_ by Aleksandar Jelenak.

Add MPI Collective I/O Support
------------------------------
Support for using MPI Collective I/O in both low-level and high-level code has
been added. See the collective_io.py example for a simple demonstration of how
to use MPI Collective I/O with the high level API.

This work was added in `#648`_ by Jialin Liu.

Numerous build/testing/CI improvements
--------------------------------------
There were a number of improvements to the setup.py file, which should mean that
`pip install h5py` should work in most places. Work was also done to clean up
the current testing system, using tox is the recommended way of testing h5py
across different Python versions. See `#576`_ by Jakob Lombacher, `#640`_ by
Lawrence Mitchell, and `#650`_, `#651`_ and `#658`_ by James Tocknell.

Cleanup of codebase based on pylint
-----------------------------------
There was a large cleanup of pylint-identified problems by Andrew Collette
(`#578`_, `#579`_).

Fixes to low-level API
----------------------
Fixes to the typing of functions were added in `#597`_ by Ulrik Kofoed
Pedersen, `#589`_ by Peter Chang, and `#625`_ by Spaghetti Sort. A fix for
variable-length arrays was added in `#621`_ by Sam Mason. Fixes to compound
types were added in `#639`_ by @nevion and `#606`_ by Yu Feng. Finally, a fix
to type conversion was added in `#614`_ by Andrew Collette.

Documentation improvements
--------------------------
* Updates to FAQ by Dan Guest (`#608`_) and Peter Hill (`#607`_).
* Updates MPI-related documentation by Jens Timmerman (`#604`_) and
  Matthias König (`#572`_).
* Fixes to documentation building by Ghislain Antony Vaillant (`#562`_,
  `#561`_).
* Update PyTables link (`#574`_ by Dominik Kriegner)
* Add File opening modes to docstring (`#563`_ by Antony Lee)

Other changes
-------------
* Add `Dataset.ndim` (`#649`_, `#660`_ by @jakirkham, `#661`_ by James Tocknell)
* Fix import errors in IPython completer (`#605`_ by Niru Maheswaranathan)
* Turn off error printing in new threads (`#583`_ by Andrew Collette)
* Use item value in `KeyError` instead of error message (`#642`_ by Matthias Geier)


.. _`#561` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/561
.. _`#562` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/562
.. _`#563` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/563
.. _`#572` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/572
.. _`#574` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/574
.. _`#576` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/576
.. _`#578` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/578
.. _`#579` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/579
.. _`#583` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/583
.. _`#589` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/589
.. _`#597` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/597
.. _`#604` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/604
.. _`#605` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/605
.. _`#606` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/606
.. _`#607` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/607
.. _`#608` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/608
.. _`#614` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/614
.. _`#621` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/621
.. _`#625` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/625
.. _`#639` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/639
.. _`#640` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/640
.. _`#642` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/642
.. _`#648` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/648
.. _`#649` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/649
.. _`#650` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/650
.. _`#651` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/651
.. _`#658` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/658
.. _`#660` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/660
.. _`#661` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/661
.. _`#663` : https://github.com/h5py/h5py/pull/663

Acknowledgements
----------------
