Noteworthy changes in release 1.3  (15 December 2015)

* Files can now be accessed via HTTPS and Amazon S3 in addition to HTTP
  and FTP, when HTSlib is configured to use libcurl for network file access
  rather than the included basic knetfile networking.

* HTSlib can be built to use remote access hFILE backends (such as iRODS
  and libcurl) via a plugin mechanism.  This allows other backends to be
  easily added and facilitates building tools that use HTSlib, as they
  don't need to be linked with the backends' various required libraries.

* fai_build() and samtools faidx now accept initial whitespace in ">"
  headers (e.g., "> chr1 description" is taken to refer to "chr1").

* tabix --only-header works again (was broken in 1.2.x; #249).

* HTSlib's configure script and Makefile now fully support the standard
  convention of allowing CC/CPPFLAGS/CFLAGS/LDFLAGS/LIBS to be overridden
  as needed.  Previously the Makefile listened to $(LDLIBS) instead; if you
  were overriding that, you should now override LIBS rather than LDLIBS.

* Fixed bugs #168, #172, #176, #197, #206, #225, #245, #265, #295, and #296.


Noteworthy changes in release 1.2.1  (3 February 2015)

* Reinstated hts_file_type() and FT_* macros, which were available until 1.1
  but briefly removed in 1.2.  This function is deprecated and will be removed
  in a future release -- you should use hts_detect_format() etc instead


Noteworthy changes in release 1.2  (2 February 2015)

* HTSlib now has a configure script which checks your build environment
  and allows for selection of optional extras.  See INSTALL for details

* By default, reference sequences are fetched from the EBI CRAM Reference
  Registry and cached in your $HOME cache directory.  This behaviour can
  be controlled by setting REF_PATH and REF_CACHE enviroment variables
  (see the samtools(1) man page for details)

* Numerous CRAM improvements:
  - Support for CRAM v3.0, an upcoming revision to CRAM supporting
    better compression and per-container checksums
  - EOF checking for v2.1 and v3.0 (similar to checking BAM EOF blocks)
  - Non-standard values for PNEXT and TLEN fields are now preserved
  - hts_set_fai_filename() now provides a reference file when encoding
  - Generated read names are now numbered from 1, rather than being
    labelled 'slice:record-in-slice'
  - Multi-threading and speed improvements

* New htsfile command for identifying file formats, and corresponding
  file format detection APIs

* New tabix --regions FILE, --targets FILE options for filtering via BED files

* Optional iRODS file access, disabled by default.  Configure with --with-irods
  to enable accessing iRODS data objects directly via 'irods:DATAOBJ'

* All occurences of 2^29 in the source have been eliminated, so indexing
  and querying against reference sequences larger than 512Mbp works (when
  using CSI indices)

* Support for plain GZIP compression in various places

* VCF header editing speed improvements

* Added seq_nt16_int[] (equivalent to the samtools API's bam_nt16_nt4_table)

* Reinstated faidx_fetch_nseq(), which was accidentally removed from 1.1.
  Now faidx_fetch_nseq() and faidx_nseq() are equivalent; eventually
  faidx_fetch_nseq() will be deprecated and removed [#156]

* Fixed bugs #141, #152, #155, #158, #159, and various memory leaks
