Chris,
> 1) The netCDF manual doesn't explicitly forbid it, but from the
> code it looks impossible for a string valued attribute
> to have more than one value, i.e. in CDL:
>
> my_var:greetings = "hello", "goodbye";
>
> Am I correct that this is not allowed?
You can do this in CDL, but it just concatenates the strings into a single
array of characters. Since any attribute is just a one-dimensional array of
values of some type, the result is an attribute of characters of length
large enough to hold the string "hellogoodbye". There is really no such
thing as a "string-valued" attribute, since "string" is not one of the
primitive netCDF types. However multi-valued attributes of character type
are not very different from string-valued attributes, in that they are an
array of characters with a length. If you want to adopt a convention that
"," separates strings, for example, then the attribute "one,two,three" could
be thought of as a string-valued attribute containing three strings, but
that's purely convention. The netCDF library treats it as a single attribute
of 14 characters.
> 2) We have been building off of netCDF 2.02 on your ftp
> server. Have there been any bug fixes / modifications
> since then that we should be aware of?
Glenn described a significant optimization for netCDF on UNIX that we
haven't decided how to package yet.
There was a minor change to ncdump and ncgen to permit the netCDF names in a
CDL file to begin with a non-alphabetic character, and thus to permit ncgen
to work for files generated by ncdump from filenames that begin with a
non-alphabetic character.
There have been some clarifications and fixes to the documentation and the
installation instructions and a minor bug fix to the FORTRAN interface.
I don't think you need to be concerned with any of these changes for your
release.
--Russ
