Bug#853750: Merge this bug into 848257

[Giuseppe Bilotta]

Sorry for the late reply, for some reason I didn't get this message in my mail.


On Tue, 16 May 2017 15:31:47 -0500 Liam Healy
<lnp at healy.washington.dc.us> wrote:
> I believe this bug is already reported, see https://bugs.debian.org/848257.

I'm not sure it's the same bug. The java runtime warning doesn't seem
to be connected with the impossibility to view HDF files.

Using hdfview version 2.9-3+b2 with libjhdf{4,5}-{java,jni} version
2.9-3+b2 works, even though I get the warning about the java runtime
in #848257.

Upgrading libjhdf* makes all HDF5 come up blank. So the warning seems
like a separate problems.

I think the problem here is different, and it depends on an
non-documented ABI incomatibility between HDF5 versions. the 2.9-3 jni
depends on libhdf5-8 (1.8.13), whereas the 2.11 one depends on
libhdf5-100 (1.10). I suspect the Java bindings were not properly
updated to the latest ABI of libhdf5.

The upstream page
https://support.hdfgroup.org/products/java/release/download.html has
some notices about this. Among other things, it remarks:

> Please be aware that the software included below uses the HDF4 and HDF5 Java wrappers with 32-bit object identifiers for use with HDF5-1.8.17 and HDF 4.2.12

Even more importantly, the ABI compatibility check for libhdf5
https://abi-laboratory.pro/tracker/timeline/hdf5/ remark that 1.8.14
introduced some breaking changes compared to previous HDF5 versions,
and further changes were introduced in 1.10.0. I am not sure how this
all affects hdfview, but it might be worth to at least try and upgrade
to the latest version (2.13), since otherwise Stretch will have no
usable version of hdfview.