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[netcdfgroup] Build notes: NetCDF-4 on Mac OS X

Hello all,

I've managed to build the latest snapshot of netcdf-4 (2008022102) on Mac OS X 10.4 (PPC) with gcc4.0.1 and IBM XL Fortran 8.1. There were a few tricks required to get this to work, so here are my build notes:

1. Download and install HDF5 1.8.0 (it is only necessary to compile and install the C libraries)
2. Download latest snapshot version of netcdf-4
3. set the following environment variables:

F77=xlf
FC=xlf90
CPPFLAGS=-DIBMR2Fortran

4. ./configure --enable-netcdf-4 --with-hdf5=/usr/local (or wherever you have it installed)

5. For some reason the libtool created in the previous step by configure does not contain a tag for compiling f90 programs (tag=FC). Thus the build will crash out on the very first step. This took me a long time to figure out. Once I did, I was able to copy the tag section for FC from the netcdf-4-beta1 release of netcdf which creates the FC tag in libtool correctly.

5. make; make check; make install

Building shared libraries does not work on my hardware/software setup. While creating the netcdff (separate fortran library) the linker complains about missing symbols, mainly from the netcdf C library (nc_*). Could this be a build order problem, or possibly a case of missing dependencies? Unfortunately I am not familiar enough with automake to track this one down.

Cheers, Jed