PDI distribution 1.8.0

The PDI team is proud to announce the release of PDI distribution 1.8.0

This minor release introduces the following new features:

• NetCDF plugin now support the size_of attribute #446
• Deisa plugin for in-situ analysis using Dask #447

In addition, it makes the following changes:

• Replaced the astyle based indentation by a clang-format one #349
• Update the version of dependencies according to our policy: oldest supported Ubuntu & Fedora, oldstable debian & spack 0.18. The new requirements are: CMake 3.16, NetCDF 4.7, Python 3.8, mpi4py 3.0, numpy 1.17, pybind11 2.4
  • do not embed doxygen anymore
  • directly use vendored gtest, benchmark & ZPP #465

Also, removes the following:

• Removed deprecated, unmaintained and unsupported plugins and tools for thedistribution: Decl'SION, FlowVR, FTI and test plugins, as well as the PDI Config validator #458
• Removed support for the PDI Config validator #458

Fixes the following bugs:

• Support installation with the latest version of python where setuptools is an external lib #457
• Fixed compilation with {fmt} version 11+ #456

Adds the following features for plugin developers:

• Add the Context::find() method #445
• Add the pybind11::dtype to_python(const std::shared_ptr<const Scalar_datatype>& scalar_type) helper function.
• Create a method that dereferences a pointer type and returns the data as a new Reference #443
• Add the function scalar_assign to Ref_any to ease setting the value of a scalar data buffer.

Makes the following changes for plugin developers:

• Renamed Datatype_template_ptr to Datatype_template_sptr that should now be used instead.

Introduces the following deprecations for plugin developers:

• The Datatype_template_ptr type is now deprecated, Datatype_template_sptr should be used instead.