[Live-demo] netCDF4 libs

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

On 05/11/2016 05:50 AM, Brian M Hamlin wrote:
>   How can I check the versions of the netCDF stack as things progress ?  

That depends. The latest versions available in Debian and upstream are
included in the Debian GIS DDPO:

 https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-grass-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org&comaint=yes&version=oldoldstable

>   Where can I make a pull-request for a trivial change to a package .dsc ?

Package dsc files are generated so changing them makes no sense. You can
discuss changes to the netcdf source packages on the debian-gis list [0]
and/or file a bugreport for the package in question [1].

[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-gis/
[1] https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Reporting

>   What is a good way to trace UbuntuGIS - testing PPA versions for python-netcdf4 -> netcdf-c -> lib hdf5
>     (there are several, how would *you* do it )  for our next dev-cycle.. 

Define "trace".

If you're looking for the interdependencies I would parse the Packages
files from the PPA and analyse the Depends fields of the packages in
question.

Because I have coordinated the recent netcdf transitions, I have a
pretty good idea of the dependency chain.

netcdf-c (netcdf source package) is at the bottom, everything else
depends on that. netcdf-cxx-legacy, netcdf-cxx, netcdf-fortran &
netcdf4-python all require the netcdf package to build. netcdf in turn
requires hdf5 to build.

To help prepare transitions, I run a transition tracker [2] using the
ben package [3] also used for Debian [4] & Ubuntu [5]. ben visualizes
the reverse dependencies for packages and marks them as good or bad
based on the regular expressions applied to the fields in the Packages
files (usually just Depends).

[2] http://linuxminded.nl/tmp/pkg-grass-transitions/html/netcdf-c.html
[3] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ben
[4] https://release.debian.org/transitions/
[5] https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/transitions/

>   Where is a convenient place to file an update ticket : 
> "netCDF4 project home page has moved from code.google.com to github.com/Unidata; update source description"

Convenient != Appropriate

You should file bugreports in the tracker for the repository in
question, in this case UbuntuGIS/OSGeo-Live.

If you verify that the issue is also present in the packaging maintained
by the Debian GIS team, you can contact the Debian GIS team via the
mailinglist or file a bugreport for the package in question.

> dsc content:
>   stable_dsc | python-netcdf4_1.1.0-0~trusty1 | Homepage          | http://code.google.com/p/netcdf4-python/
> 
>   make sense ?  thanks

That looks like the python-netcdf4 source package from OSGeo-Live 9.5,
it is maintained by The Mer <rememberthemer at gmail.com> according to its
control file.

It is not maintained by the Debian GIS team, the netcdf4-python package
is maintained by the Debian GIS team and included in Debian & Ubuntu. It
does not have these issues.

Regarding NetCDF & Python, only the python{,3}-netcdf4 packages built
from the netcdf4-python source package are actively maintained. The
python-netcdf package built from the python-scientific package as used
by bin/install_jupyter.sh is very problematic. It does not support newer
NumPy versions and has been broken in Debian for quite a while and has
recently been removed from Debian because it was keeping the old NetCDF
4.1.3 packages in Debian unstable (due to being unable to build with the
newer versions). [6]

These issues with python-scientific also caused it to be removed from
Ubuntu xenial, so bin/install_jupyter.sh needs to be updated to not
require python-netcdf any more.

[6] https://lists.debian.org/debian-gis/2016/05/msg00009.html

Kind Regards,

Bas

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