Re: GDL ITP

[Igor Khavkine <igor.kh@gmail.com>]

On 1/4/06, Juan Antonio Añel Cabanelas <aetherlux@gulo.org> wrote:
> I opened an ITP for Gnudatalaguage (GDL could be confusing in Debian
> because it is similar to "Gnome Development Library") 9 months ago.
>
> It exist some problems with libraries, GDL is a complex package, but a
> friend of mine and my sponsor, DD, has packaged a GDL version with
> without support for HDF files and it is not tested.

Let me take a guess at why HDF support was turned off. I just tried
compiling the latest release of GDL (0.8.11) and ran into a problem.
The problem has to do with the netcdf.h header file. In Debian, it can
be found in two packages:

libhdf4g-dev: usr/include/hdf/netcdf.h
netcdfg-dev: usr/include/netcdf.h

When all the features are turned on, GDL wants both the HDF4 and
NetCDF libraries to be available. The header file it really wants is
from the netcdfg-dev package. However, if HDF4 support is turned on,
the -I/usr/include/hdf gets passed to gcc. Hence, the header file from
libhdf4g-dev will always take priority over the other one, since
netcdfg-dev puts it into the standard include path.

The two easiest solutions to this problem is to either replace every
instance of <netcdf.h> in GDL by "/usr/include/netcdf.h" (after which
everything compiles fine) or to hack the Makefiles to remove the HDF
directory from the include path for the few source files that cause
problems. However, given that there is at least one application that
encounters this problem, does it make sense to try to fix this at the
level of the packaging of netcdfg-dev? For instance, GDL itself tries
to look for NetCDF headers in /usr/include/netcdf-3.

Note, I don't use IDL or GDL myself, but I do know some people who
might be interested GDL depending on how usable it is.

Igor