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 :pr:`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 :pr:`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 :pr:`576` by Jakob Lombacher, :pr:`640` by
Lawrence Mitchell, and :pr:`650`, :pr:`651` and :pr:`658` by James Tocknell.

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

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

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

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

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