[DebianGIS-dev] Bug#521221: [help at hdfgroup.org: Bug 1534 HDF5 library names]

[Francesco P. Lovergine]

tags 521221 + wontfix
tags 521221 + upstream
thanks


FYI, if anyone is able to push a different approach to HDF group 
this could be fixed. It is a non sense fixing this in debian only
because we would loose source compatibility with upstream.


----- Forwarded message from help at hdfgroup.org -----

Date: Fri, 5 Jun 2009 12:38:36 -0500 (CDT)
From: help at hdfgroup.org
To: frankie at debian.org
Subject: Bug 1534 HDF5 library names 
User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (LRH 1167 2008-08-23)

Hello Mr. Lovergine,

Thank you for your suggestion.  We have looked into using
suffix to distinguish different configurations of HDF5
libraries but decided against it due to three concerns:

1. This would require the HDF5 library users to maintain different
   versions of autoconfigure and/or Makefiles.  This is a
   minor concern.

2. A more major one is that HDF5 can have several different
   configurations on many big platforms.  E.g.,
   Due to the big diversity of users in those big platforms,
   the System Admin may have built and installed multiple
   variations of the same HDF5 release:
   a. with or without MPI parallel support;
   b. 32bit or 64 bits OS support (e.g., AIX, SunOS, ...);
   c. different compilers like Gcc, Intel, or PGI vendors;
   d. different versions of the same compilers (e.g., gcc 4.2, 4.3);
   e. with or without some HDF5 supported compression features;
   In those platforms, the admin usually installs the binaries
   of each variation in a separated directory.  E.g.,
   /usr/apps/hdf5/v1.8.3_gcc4.2_mpich2_107/{bin,lib,include}
   /usr/apps/hdf5/v1.8.3_Intel10.1/{bin,lib,include}
   ...

3. Lastly, a critical concern is that we need to deal with the
   HDF5 header files too.  The header files of an MPI-Supported
   HDF5 built are different in contents from a serial-only HDF5
   built. They cannot be installed in the same directory.  If
   we were to rename the header files with different suffixes,
   it would make HDF5 application source code files much more
   complex.

Therefore, we have chosen to stay with the same name for the HDF5
library and header files. but rely on other software loading
tools such as "module" to help the users to pick and choose
their own flavors of HDF5 libraries.

We recognize that this is not the perfect solution for everyone
in all situations but we feel this is a good compromise for our
users.

========
> From Francesco P. Lovergine
...
* MPI flavors use the same names of serial libraries, which prevents installing
  and using both serial and MPI flavors of the libraries on the same system.
  Other libraries provide a _mpi suffixes for MPI-enabled libraries to allow that.
=========

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Francesco P. Lovergine