NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
Current content can be found at unidata.ucar.edu.
To learn about what's going on, see About the Archive Site.
NOTICE: This version of the NSF Unidata web site (archive.unidata.ucar.edu) is no longer being updated.
Current content can be found at unidata.ucar.edu.
To learn about what's going on, see About the Archive Site.
Thank you, Ward. On 11/06/2014 06:06 PM, Ward Fisher wrote:
Thanks all for the input re: bundling the different interfaces; it’s clear this is more convenient. I would argue that the benefit is not strictly to us developers at the expense of the poor users (as somebody put it :) ); the split makes it much easier to provide support for individual interfaces, as well as faster bug fixes as previously mentioned. There are significant technical hurdles to recombining the interfaces into a single project, as it was for versions 4.1.3 and prior.
However, the various interfaces have a hierarchical dependence, all of them - except for Java - depending on the C interface. This gives them some sort of unity, at least when one has to *use* them. Nobody can get the F90 interface to work without the Fortran (77) one, and the latter doesn't work without the C interface either. Hence, from the user/programmer standpoint, I think breaking this unit into smaller pieces is artificial and not helpful. Additional difficulties happen also when one has to build more tools in the NetCDF universe (NCO, NCL, CDO, etc) which depend on NetCDF (and sometimes on specific library versions). Those difficulties may also be reduced by having a clear and unified public distribution. However, I guess there may be a way to reconcile the two, keeping the developement in separate projects, and yet provide a bundled distribution for users/programmers as it was before.
There may be avenues for making distribution more transparent and easier to keep track of from the end user point-of-view, however. I may start a new thread once I’ve explored a couple of ideas.
That would really be great for NetCDF users/programmers, and hopefully won't be a hurdle for the developers. As others list subscribers certainly did, I built NetCDF C 4.3.0, along with Fortran 4.2 and C++4.4.2, which are available from Unidata as separate tarballs. I keep them under a single environment module in our clusters (actually one per compiler), which is very convenient from the user point of view, and seems to be all we need to compile and run correctly a large number of programs (from NCAR, GFDL, MPII, MIT, some inhouse codes, etc). But what took some time for me to setup, may not be so hard for the developers. So, maybe Unidata could bundle the three main interfaces into a single public/external/vanilla distribution, perhaps under a single release name(NetCDF.all.X.Y.Z perhaps?), which would build from a single configure/make/make_install action, as it was done until 4.3.1,
and likewise for subsequent public releases. The existence of a single bundled release also reassures the end user that he is dealing with a consistent software package. (S)he doesn't need to go crazy to find out what set of specific interface releases are consistent with each other, or to spend too much time building/testing each one separately. Anyway, I'm glad that somehow my hijacking of this thread was not just an annoyance to the list, but had also a productive side. Thank you Gus Correa
Regarding the question below about binary distributions for OSX and Windows. We provide Windows binaries because, frankly, building with Visual Studio can be a bit of a mess, and providing the libraries packaged with dependencies seemed like the easiest way to head off a lot of problems. These can be downloaded here: * http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/winbin.html I wasn’t under the impression that there was much need for OSX binary distributions, since OSX is essentially BSD and works with autotools and/or CMake. I know that the popular package managers |homebrew| and |macports| have netcdf packages (which we do not maintain), and had always thought these must be sufficient, as nobody has said otherwise. I’d be really interested to know if these were insufficient! Thanks all, -Ward On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 3:34 PM, Chris Barker <chris.barker@xxxxxxxx <mailto:chris.barker@xxxxxxxx>> wrote: On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Gus Correa <gus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:gus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote: PS - Yes, I do understand the initial thread was about NetCDF3 vs NetCDF4, which is a separate discussion in itself. Bringing it back --- One of the main reasons users don't use netcdf4 is that it's substantially harder to build (and more heavy weight). As (at least for the c libs) the netcdf4 libs fully support netcdf3, there really isn't any reason for all client code to use the netcdf4 libraries, regardless of whether they are actually using netcdf4 files. So anything Unidata can do to make it easier for end users to use netcdf4 will really help: Easier to build Good binary distributions (for Window and probably OS-X anyway) ??? -Chris -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 <tel:%28206%29%20526-6959> voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 <tel:%28206%29%20526-6329> fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 <tel:%28206%29%20526-6317> main reception Chris.Barker@xxxxxxxx <mailto:Chris.Barker@xxxxxxxx>
netcdfgroup archives: