The pre-built netcdf binaries *should* work with those packages, so it
would be fine to refer people to those sites I think. However, the
installer does come bundled with the dependencies (libhdf5.dll,
libcurl.dll, zlib.dll, etc) that netcdf was built against. The issue people
run in to is that these libraries live inside a directory and need to be
either manually copied into a folder on the system PATH or have the folder
added to the path.
When building out the packaging system, I was loathe to do either of these
automatically because I didn’t want to overwrite any pre-existing
libraries, or modify the system path. This is becoming a larger issue,
however, so I should probably revisit these decisions.
Now that I’ve thought about it a moment, it seems to be that originally I
ran into incompatibilities between the zlib.dll which libhdf5 links against
and the zlib.dll which libcurl was linked against. Rather than digging in
to it too deeply, I built and linked both against the same zlib,
eliminating the issue. This was maybe 18-24 months ago, however; I don’t
know if it would still be an issue.
Since, as you mention, this was not apparent from the webpage where you
could download the pre-built software, I will see about making this more
clear; I think there is a line or two that should be made more prominent to
anybody installing the binaries what *exactly* needs to happen to get the
utilities to work.
-Ward
On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Don Hooper (NOAA Affiliate) <
don.k.hooper@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
All,
>
> A number of users have been perplexed by the change of format for many
> of the files in our (ESRL/PSD's) archives from NetCDF3 to NetCDF4-Classic .
> Many of them are Windows users, so I found the Unidata web page where they
> could download pre-built software. However, the users then responded that
> they were getting errors about not having HDF5 libraries. I didn't see
> anything about that on the Unidata page, so I went poking around for both
> pre-built HDF5 libraries and pre-built libcurl libraries for Windows.
> The latter related to an nccopy command-line we have been suggesting for
> folks who wanted a NetCDF3 version of one of the NC4 files in our archive .
> That is, a command like:
>
> nccopy -k 1 URL-to-our-TDS-server localFileName.nc
>
> I've determined that we should suggest to the Windows users that they
> download software from the following three URLs:
>
> http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/release/obtain5.html
> http://curl.haxx.se/download.html
> http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/winbin.html
>
> Have I got them all? Any changes suggested? These users seem to
> need help from folks more used to doing software installs (and
> maybe builds). However, we lack any and all Windows expertise.
>
> Thanks,
> -Hoop
>
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