[Kst] NetCDF packages

[Cristian Morales Vega]

On 15 October 2014 14:15, Christian Trippe <ctrippe at opensuse.org> wrote:
> Hi Nicolas,
>
>> On 14/10/2014 20:55, Nicolas Brisset wrote:
>> > Hi Christian/Jan,
>> >
>> > You may have seen on the Kst list that we're trying to get NetCDF-4 to
>> > work better, which requires to compile NetCDF it with HDF5 support. Under
>> > Linux, at least on OpenSuse, apparently there is HDF5 support. However, I
>> > tried to work with one file making use of newer NetCDF-4 features and I
>> > noticed that the C++ wrapper we use is obsolete. Apparently, since
>> > version 4.2 the C++ library has been improved by Lynton Appel (which I'm
>> > putting in CC in case he has news from the packaging front) and split out
>> > of the base package, see
>> > http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/downloads/netcdf/netcdf-cxx/index.jsp and
>> > http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/cxx4/
>> >
>> > Questions:
>> > 1) do you know who's maintaining the NetCDF packages?
>
> The NetCDF C++ library is maintained by Christian Morales Vega (in CC) (at
> least osc says so)

I have never maintained netcdf, but I created the netcdf-cxx package
(and there should be also a netcdf-cxx4 one).
Originally the C++ support was part of the same tarball than the C
support. But in version 4.2 C++ support was split... And it wasn't
just split in a C++ tarball, but in two of them. A version supporting
NetCDF-3 (netcdf-c++) and a version supporting NetCDF-4
((netcdf-c++4).
In request https://build.opensuse.org/request/show/113047 ocefpaf said
that he was going to add a new package with the C++ support "soon",
but I guess it never happened.

Meanwhile we were close to a release, and we were losing HDF5 support
in kst. And kst did only support the NetCDF-3 version of the C++
wrapper. So I created a package for the NetCDF-3 version of the C++
wrapper specifically to fix kst. I was hoping kst would soon update
its code to support the NetCDF-4 version and my package could be
dropped.
Since there was no user of the NetCDF-4 version of the C++ wrapper
neither me, not anybody else apparently, ever created a package for
it.

Since then my life has changed a lot, now I got a child and a lot less
free time available. So I have not looked into this at all since then
(2012).


>> > 2) do you think it would be an issue to update to this new wrapper?
>
> I don't know of another user of libnetcdf_c++.so.4 except of kst in openSUSE,
> so we probably can update to the version which is required by kst.

Yes. It was always the plan.
I downloaded the tarballs from
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/downloads/netcdf/netcdf-cxx/index.jsp
My package is named netcdf-cxx, following the tarball nomenclature
there should be another one named netcdf-c++4. But I'm not sure the
libraries are correctly versioned to support both of them at the same
time. Still, netcdf-cxx should probably be dropped.