Re: HDF-EOS

[Alastair McKinstry <alastair.mckinstry@ichec.ie>]

Hi,

I've built HDF-EOS 5 locally as an experiment - straightforward. No  
dependency on libGctp.

Do you think it would be worth then adding HDF EOS 2 + 5 or just one  
of them to Debian ?


From my perspective (and the perspective of my employer www.ichec.ie  
who's sponsoring my time on this  )
shaking out the bugs in HDF and compilers is one of the strengths of  
working within Debian - producing
quality code and fixing the bugs once and for all.

For szip support: I'd build initially without szip support, then  
investigate the cost of adding a dlopen()
patch to support szip if its present. Perhaps szip can be added to non- 
free then.

Regards
Alastair

On 28 Apr 2009, at 16:13, George White wrote:

> On Mon, 27 Apr 2009, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Has anyone any experience with HDF-EOS ? This is a specialised form  
> > of the HDF data format from NASA.
> > http://www.hdfgroup.org/hdfeos.html
> >
> > Specifically, has anyone used it with Debian, or know about  
> > packaging it for Debian ?
>
> HDF-EOS2 is used by NASA SeaDAS, which I have used on Debian (i386),  
> and which is currently developed on Ubuntu (but distributed via tar  
> archives). There are reasonable tools to convert hdf4 to hdf5,  
> including some support for hdf5.  The latter is more portable and  
> has better support for multiprocessing, so some people (e.g., R- 
> project) prefer to use hdf5 in new code and convert legacy files to  
> hdf5.
>
> > Its used by some projects I support at work, and doesn't appear to  
> > be in Debian yet, and might add it to the Debian Meteorology blend.  
> > I'm looking for license information now, but it appears to be free.
>
> HDF-EOS2 uses hdf4 plus libGctp (map transformations), so you would  
> start
> with libGctp.  Szip is an optional and non-free component, but widely
> used, so whether you consider HDF-EOS to be free depends on whether
> you need Szip.
>
> In the past it has been a lot of work to build any of the hdf  
> libraries, especially if you want Fortran.  Usually you end up stuck  
> at some compiler bug, already known to the hdfgroup developers, and  
> have to rebuild your compiler with the patches applied.  Hopefully  
> this is better now (at least with GNU compilers I don't have to  
> fight to have the vendor support contracts paid).  I have built hdf5  
> libraries a couple times on MacOSX (x86_64) and Ubuntu (i386).  The  
> resulting libraries don't pass all the tests, but have been working  
> well enough for our needs.  Not the sort
> of thing you want to distribute, however.
>
> > Regards
> > Alastair McKinstry
> >
> >
> > --
> > Alastair McKinstry , <alastair.mckinstry@ichec.ie>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-science-request@lists.debian.org
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>
> --
> George White <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca> <gnw3@acm.org>
> 189 Parklea Dr., Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia  B3Z 2G6
>
>
> --
> To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-science-request@lists.debian.org
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Regards
Alastair McKinstry


--
Alastair McKinstry , <alastair.mckinstry@ichec.ie>