Dear BioC Developers,
Just a heads up to point out that I've made a fundamental change to the
rhdf5 package over the last week. I've directly emailed developers of
packages that I think this affects, but thought I would post here too in
case I missed someone.
These changes are mostly to make it link against Rhdf5lib, which in turn
updates the version of the HDF5 library we're using. For the most part
this seems like it shouldn't disrupt things too much, but it has a really
dramatic effect on the H5close() function. The previously advertised use
was to do some house keeping and close any HDF5 references that are left
open. However if you run it with the updated version, it now shuts down
the HDF5 interface and you pretty much have to restart your R session for
any further rhdf5 commands to work. This is obviously not ideal behaviour
if it's already incorporated into your code!
Despite this, I'm going to leave H5close() in the package since it mirrors
part of the HDF5 API, but that may change as it feels pretty useless to a
package developer. With this in mind, if you are using it I think there's
three options you can choose to update your code:
- There is a straight drop in replacement to close everything with the
new h5closeAll() function.
- Check if you need to close things at all. There were a number of
other functions that left open handles if they exited under error
conditions that have now been updated to exit more gracefully. If you were
only using H5close() as a safety net it might now not be needed at all.
- Use the appropriate close function for the HDF5 type e.g. H5Fclose(),
H5Dclose() etc. If you're using higher level functions like h5create()
and h5write() this doesn't apply.
The changes are now in the Bioc devel branch (rhdf5 version 2.23.3), and
should appear fairly soon. Please let me know if I can provide any more
info, or things start behaving unexpectedly. I've tried to test this
thoroughly, but there's always cases that I will have missed.
Cheers,
Mike
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