Re: GDL ITP

[Thomas Walter <t.walter@nefkom.net>]

Hello,

On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 22:36, Igor Khavkine wrote:
> 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.
> 

I think there should be found a solution which allows both.
As far as I know, the best would be to use HDF5 and perhaps combined
with netCDF-4 project to get he benefit of both.  Campatibility and
simplicity from CDF and the rich data model from HDF5.

> 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.
> 

That would result in a loss to use the improved data functionality of
HDF5.

> 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
> 
> 

Kind Regards,
Thomas