Not really addressing the key point, but...
On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 9:39 AM, David W. Pierce <dpierce@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The maintenance of the R package that supplies a netcdf interface is
> something that I have considered as well. I first released it over 10 years
> ago and at some point it will likely not be possible for me to continue
> sole-sourcing it. One of the biggest issues is support for Windows and the
> Mac. Since I don't use R on WIndows and have no access to a Mac it's always
> a struggle to keep the package working on those platforms. Please correct
> me if I'm wrong, but the netcdf folks support binaries for Windows but not
> in the format needed for R applications, which is mingw. So there is the
> burden of creating Windows netcdf library binaries as well.
>
in generally, mingw is quite compatible with stuff compiled by MSVS -- how
could it call system dlls, after all? So I suspect that the unidata-built
dll would work fine.
But you still need someone on Windows testing, debugging, etc... I'm not an
R user, but for Python, packages are built by folks that do Windows
packaging for Python -- is there anything like that for R?
> In the end, if the wider netcdf community was interested of the idea of
> transitioning ncdf4 (and my other netcdf package, ncview, as well I
> suppose) to a more Unidata or community supported model, as Roy may be
> hinting, I certainly would be all for that.
>
Well, community supported is tricky to "just do" you can provide fertile
ground, but something still has to grow.
But a good first step is to put the code up on gitHub -- that way users can
quickly grab a copy, test a pre-release version, maybe try a bug-fix,
report issues, etc. If you make it easy for folks to help, they may just do
it...
You could probably put it on the unidata organization project, but it
doesn't much matter, really.
-CHB
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