## Improvements to S3 Documentation
* Create a new document *quickstart_paths.md* that give a summary of the legal path formats used by netcdf-c. This includes both file paths and URL paths.
* Modify *nczarr.md* to remove most of the S3 related text.
* Move the S3 text from *nczarr.md* to a new document *cloud.md*.
* Add some S3-related text to the *byterange.md* document.
Hopefully, this will make it easier for users to find the information they want.
## Rebuild NCZarr Testing
In order to avoid problems with running make check in parallel, two changes were made:
1. The *nczarr_test* test system was rebuilt. Now, for each test.
any generated files are kept in a test-specific directory, isolated
from all other test executions.
2. Similarly, since the S3 test bucket is shared, any generated S3 objects
are isolated using a test-specific key path.
## Other S3 Related Changes
* Add code to ensure that files created on S3 are reclaimed at end of testing.
* Used the bash "trap" command to ensure S3 cleanup even if the test fails.
* Cleanup the S3 related configure.ac flag set since S3 is used in several places. So now one should use the option *--enable-s3* instead of *--enable-nczarr-s3*, although the latter is still kept as a deprecated alias for the former.
* Get some of the github actions yml to work with S3; required fixing various test scripts adding a secret to access the Unidata S3 bucket.
* Cleanup S3 portion of libnetcdf.settings.in and netcdf_meta.h.in and test_common.in.
* Merge partial S3 support into dhttp.c.
* Create an experimental s3 access library especially for use with Windows. It is enabled by using the options *--enable-s3-internal* (automake) or *-DENABLE_S3_INTERNAL=ON* (CMake). Also add a unit-test for it.
* Move some definitions from ncrc.h to ncs3sdk.h
## Other Changes
* Provide a default implementation of strlcpy and move this and similar defaults into *dmissing.c*.
Filter support has three goals:
1. Use the existing HDF5 filter implementations,
2. Allow filter metadata to be stored in the NumCodecs metadata format used by Zarr,
3. Allow filters to be used even when HDF5 is disabled
Detailed usage directions are define in docs/filters.md.
For now, the existing filter API is left in place. So filters
are defined using ''nc_def_var_filter'' using the HDF5 style
where the id and parameters are unsigned integers.
This is a big change since filters affect many parts of the code.
In the following, the terms "compressor" and "filter" and "codec" are generally
used synonomously.
### Filter-Related Changes:
* In order to support dynamic loading of shared filter libraries, a new library was added in the libncpoco directory; it helps to isolate dynamic loading across multiple platforms.
* Provide a json parsing library for use by plugins; this is created by merging libdispatch/ncjson.c with include/ncjson.h.
* Add a new _Codecs attribute to allow clients to see what codecs are being used; let ncdump -s print it out.
* Provide special headers to help support compilation of HDF5 filters when HDF5 is not enabled: netcdf_filter_hdf5_build.h and netcdf_filter_build.h.
* Add a number of new test to test the new nczarr filters.
* Let ncgen parse _Codecs attribute, although it is ignored.
### Plugin directory changes:
* Add support for the Blosc compressor; this is essential because it is the most common compressor used in Zarr datasets. This also necessitated adding a CMake FindBlosc.cmake file
* Add NCZarr support for the big-four filters provided by HDF5: shuffle, fletcher32, deflate (zlib), and szip
* Add a Codec defaulter (see docs/filters.md) for the big four filters.
* Make plugins work with windows by properly adding __declspec declaration.
### Misc. Non-Filter Changes
* Replace most uses of USE_NETCDF4 (deprecated) with USE_HDF5.
* Improve support for caching
* More fixes for path conversion code
* Fix misc. memory leaks
* Add new utility -- ncdump/ncpathcvt -- that does more or less the same thing as cygpath.
* Add a number of new test to test the non-filter fixes.
* Update the parsers
* Convert most instances of '#ifdef _MSC_VER' to '#ifdef _WIN32'