PyTables 0.7.1

[Francesc Alted]

PyTables 0.7.1 is out!
----------------------

This is a mainly a bug-fixing release, where the next problems has
been addressed:

        - Fixed several memory leaks. After that, the memory
          consumption when using large object trees has dropped
          sensibly. However, there remains some small leaks, but
          hopefully they are not very important unless you use *huge*
          object trees.

	- Fixed a bug that make the __getitem__ special method in
          table to fail when the stop parameter in a extended slice
          was not specified. That is, table[10:] now correctly returns
          table[10:table.nrows+1], and not table[10:11].

	- The removeRows() method in Table did not update the NROWS
          attribute in Table objects, giving place to errors after
          doing further updating operations (removing or adding more
          rows) in the same table. This has been fixed now.

	- The documentation has been updated, specially a more
          detailed instructions on the compression (zlib) libraries
          installation.

Apart of these fixes, a new lazy reading algorithm for attributes has
been activated by default. With that, the opening of objects with
large hierarchies has been improved by 60% (you can obtain another
additional 10% if using python 2.3 instead of python 2.2).

Also, a stress test has been conducted in order to see if PyTables can
*really* work not only with large data tables, but also with large
object trees. In it, it has been generated and checked a file with
more than 1 TB of size and more than 100 thousand tables on it!. See
http://pytables.sourceforge.net/doc/stress-test.html for details.

As always, let me know of any bugs, suggestions, etc. you may have.

-- 
Francesc Alted