[dd_info] Initial public release of libECBUFR

Dear All, I am very pleased to inform you that Environment Canada's BUFR library, libECBUFR, was publicly released today on the free software development site " launchpad.net ". libECBUFR's main page: https://launchpad.net/libecbufr Code repository: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~libecbufr-dev/libecbufr/trunk/files <http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Elibecbufr-dev/libecbufr/trunk/files> Downloadable packages: https://launchpad.net/libecbufr/+download Currently, you might find documentation to be a little lacking. We do provide some coding examples and automatic documentation via doxygen. We intend to work on better documentation in the weeks and months ahead. Here is the release announcement: /libECBUFR is a general purpose, template-oriented BUFR encoding/decoding library. The Binary Universal Format for the Representation of meteorological data (BUFR) is a data format created and maintained by the World Meteorological Organization./ /libECBUFR was developed by the Meteorological Service of Canada to provide a uniform BUFR API and library across the various meteorological and IT components of Environment Canada that encode or decode BUFR. The library is written in the C language, but can be used with other languages (via SWIG, for instance)./ /While the software is meant mainly to be used as a library of BUFR-related functions, it also comes with two utilities to decode and encode BUFR to and from ASCII templates./ /The C code is quite generic and should compile on many platforms that can use the GNU toolchain./ /Individuals and organizations are welcome to evaluate and use libECBUFR. Please read and understand the licensing terms under the Lesser General Public License, version 3./ /Please be aware that the amount of direct software support we can provide is very limited and that we can make no promise in that regard. Like many organizations, our resources are pretty fully committed. Having said this, we do believe that there are many people and organizations in the meteorological community that can use this software, adapt it to their requirements and help us improve it. We hope that on that basis we can build a community of interest in a spirit of mutual benefit./ WIth my best regards Yves Pelletier Implementation and Operational Services National Prediction Operations Meteorological Service of Canada