## Improvements to S3 Documentation
* Create a new document *quickstart_paths.md* that give a summary of the legal path formats used by netcdf-c. This includes both file paths and URL paths.
* Modify *nczarr.md* to remove most of the S3 related text.
* Move the S3 text from *nczarr.md* to a new document *cloud.md*.
* Add some S3-related text to the *byterange.md* document.
Hopefully, this will make it easier for users to find the information they want.
## Rebuild NCZarr Testing
In order to avoid problems with running make check in parallel, two changes were made:
1. The *nczarr_test* test system was rebuilt. Now, for each test.
any generated files are kept in a test-specific directory, isolated
from all other test executions.
2. Similarly, since the S3 test bucket is shared, any generated S3 objects
are isolated using a test-specific key path.
## Other S3 Related Changes
* Add code to ensure that files created on S3 are reclaimed at end of testing.
* Used the bash "trap" command to ensure S3 cleanup even if the test fails.
* Cleanup the S3 related configure.ac flag set since S3 is used in several places. So now one should use the option *--enable-s3* instead of *--enable-nczarr-s3*, although the latter is still kept as a deprecated alias for the former.
* Get some of the github actions yml to work with S3; required fixing various test scripts adding a secret to access the Unidata S3 bucket.
* Cleanup S3 portion of libnetcdf.settings.in and netcdf_meta.h.in and test_common.in.
* Merge partial S3 support into dhttp.c.
* Create an experimental s3 access library especially for use with Windows. It is enabled by using the options *--enable-s3-internal* (automake) or *-DENABLE_S3_INTERNAL=ON* (CMake). Also add a unit-test for it.
* Move some definitions from ncrc.h to ncs3sdk.h
## Other Changes
* Provide a default implementation of strlcpy and move this and similar defaults into *dmissing.c*.
## S3 Related Fixes
* Add comprehensive support for specifying AWS profiles to provide access credentials.
* Parse the files "~/.aws/config" and "~/.aws/credentials to provide credentials for the HDF5 ROS3 driver and to locate default region.
* Add a function to obtain the currently active S3 credentials. The search rules are defined in docs/nczarr.md.
* Provide documentation for the new features.
* Modify the struct NCauth (in include/ncauth.h) to replace specific S3 credentials with a profile name.
* Add a unit test to test the operation of profile and credentials management.
* Add support for URLS of the form "s3://<bucket>/<key>"; this requires obtaining a default region.
* Allows the specification of profile and/or region in a URL of the form "#mode=nczarr,...&aws.region=...&aws.profile=..."
## Misc. Fixes
* Move the ezxml code to libdispatch so that it can be used both by DAP4 and nczarr.
* Modify nclist to provide a deep clone operation.
* Modify ncuri to provide a deep clone operation.
* Modify the .rc file format to allow the specification of a path to be tested when looking for an entry in the .rc file.
* Ensure that the NC_rcload function is called.
* Modify nchttp to support setting request headers.
Filter support has three goals:
1. Use the existing HDF5 filter implementations,
2. Allow filter metadata to be stored in the NumCodecs metadata format used by Zarr,
3. Allow filters to be used even when HDF5 is disabled
Detailed usage directions are define in docs/filters.md.
For now, the existing filter API is left in place. So filters
are defined using ''nc_def_var_filter'' using the HDF5 style
where the id and parameters are unsigned integers.
This is a big change since filters affect many parts of the code.
In the following, the terms "compressor" and "filter" and "codec" are generally
used synonomously.
### Filter-Related Changes:
* In order to support dynamic loading of shared filter libraries, a new library was added in the libncpoco directory; it helps to isolate dynamic loading across multiple platforms.
* Provide a json parsing library for use by plugins; this is created by merging libdispatch/ncjson.c with include/ncjson.h.
* Add a new _Codecs attribute to allow clients to see what codecs are being used; let ncdump -s print it out.
* Provide special headers to help support compilation of HDF5 filters when HDF5 is not enabled: netcdf_filter_hdf5_build.h and netcdf_filter_build.h.
* Add a number of new test to test the new nczarr filters.
* Let ncgen parse _Codecs attribute, although it is ignored.
### Plugin directory changes:
* Add support for the Blosc compressor; this is essential because it is the most common compressor used in Zarr datasets. This also necessitated adding a CMake FindBlosc.cmake file
* Add NCZarr support for the big-four filters provided by HDF5: shuffle, fletcher32, deflate (zlib), and szip
* Add a Codec defaulter (see docs/filters.md) for the big four filters.
* Make plugins work with windows by properly adding __declspec declaration.
### Misc. Non-Filter Changes
* Replace most uses of USE_NETCDF4 (deprecated) with USE_HDF5.
* Improve support for caching
* More fixes for path conversion code
* Fix misc. memory leaks
* Add new utility -- ncdump/ncpathcvt -- that does more or less the same thing as cygpath.
* Add a number of new test to test the non-filter fixes.
* Update the parsers
* Convert most instances of '#ifdef _MSC_VER' to '#ifdef _WIN32'
The primary fix is to improve CMake build support.
Specific changes include:
* CMake: Provide a better soln to locating the AWS SDK
libraries; the new way is the preferred method as described in
the aws-cpp-sdk documentation.
* CMake (and Automake): allow -DENABLE_S3_SDK (default off) to suppress
looking for AWS libraries.
* CMake: add the complete set of nczarr tests
* CMake: add EXTERNL as needed to various .h files.
* Improve support for windows drive letters in paths.
* Add nczarr and s3 flags to nc-config
* For VisualStudio X nczarr, cleanup the NAN+INFINITY handling
* Convert _MSC_VER -> _WIN32 and vice versa as needed
* NCZarr - support multiple platform paths including windows, cygwin.
mingw, etc.
* NCZarr - sort the test outputs because different platforms
produce directory contents in different orders.
One big change concerns netcdf-c/CMakeLists.txt and netcdf-c/configure.ac.
In the current versions, it was the case that --disable-hdf5
disabled netcdf-4 (libsrc4). With nczarr, this can no longer
be the case because nczarr requires libsrc4 even if libhdf5
is disabled. So, I modified the above files to move the
format options (HDF5, NCZarr, HDF4, etc) to a single place
near the front of the files. Now it is the case that:
* Enabling any of the formats that require libsrc4
also does an implicit --enable-netcdf4.
* --disable-netcdf4 | --disable-netcdf-4 now becomes
and alias for --disable-hdf5.
There are probably some bugs in this change in terms of
dependencies between format options.
Problems:
* CMake S3 support is still not working for Visual Studio
* A recent issue points out that there is work to do on handling
UTF8 filenames, but that will be addressed in a separate fix.
Notes:
* Consider converting all of our includes/.h files to use EXTERNL
cloud using a variant of the Zarr protocol and storage
format. This enhancement is generically referred to as "NCZarr".
The data model supported by NCZarr is netcdf-4 minus the user-defined
types and the String type. In this sense it is similar to the CDF-5
data model.
More detailed information about enabling and using NCZarr is
described in the document NUG/nczarr.md and in a
[Unidata Developer's blog entry](https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/developer/en/entry/overview-of-zarr-support-in).
WARNING: this code has had limited testing, so do use this version
for production work. Also, performance improvements are ongoing.
Note especially the following platform matrix of successful tests:
Platform | Build System | S3 support
------------------------------------
Linux+gcc | Automake | yes
Linux+gcc | CMake | yes
Visual Studio | CMake | no
Additionally, and as a consequence of the addition of NCZarr,
major changes have been made to the Filter API. NOTE: NCZarr
does not yet support filters, but these changes are enablers for
that support in the future. Note that it is possible
(probable?) that there will be some accidental reversions if the
changes here did not correctly mimic the existing filter testing.
In any case, previously filter ids and parameters were of type
unsigned int. In order to support the more general zarr filter
model, this was all converted to char*. The old HDF5-specific,
unsigned int operations are still supported but they are
wrappers around the new, char* based nc_filterx_XXX functions.
This entailed at least the following changes:
1. Added the files libdispatch/dfilterx.c and include/ncfilter.h
2. Some filterx utilities have been moved to libdispatch/daux.c
3. A new entry, "filter_actions" was added to the NCDispatch table
and the version bumped.
4. An overly complex set of structs was created to support funnelling
all of the filterx operations thru a single dispatch
"filter_actions" entry.
5. Move common code to from libhdf5 to libsrc4 so that it is accessible
to nczarr.
Changes directly related to Zarr:
1. Modified CMakeList.txt and configure.ac to support both C and C++
-- this is in support of S3 support via the awd-sdk libraries.
2. Define a size64_t type to support nczarr.
3. More reworking of libdispatch/dinfermodel.c to
support zarr and to regularize the structure of the fragments
section of a URL.
Changes not directly related to Zarr:
1. Make client-side filter registration be conditional, with default off.
2. Hack include/nc4internal.h to make some flags added by Ed be unique:
e.g. NC_CREAT, NC_INDEF, etc.
3. cleanup include/nchttp.h and libdispatch/dhttp.c.
4. Misc. changes to support compiling under Visual Studio including:
* Better testing under windows for dirent.h and opendir and closedir.
5. Misc. changes to the oc2 code to support various libcurl CURLOPT flags
and to centralize error reporting.
6. By default, suppress the vlen tests that have unfixed memory leaks; add option to enable them.
7. Make part of the nc_test/test_byterange.sh test be contingent on remotetest.unidata.ucar.edu being accessible.
Changes Left TO-DO:
1. fix provenance code, it is too HDF5 specific.
The file docs/indexing.dox tries to provide design
information for the refactoring.
The primary change is to replace all walking of linked
lists with the use of the NCindex data structure.
Ncindex is a combination of a hash table (for name-based
lookup) and a vector (for walking the elements in the index).
Additionally, global vectors are added to NC_HDF5_FILE_INFO_T
to support direct mapping of an e.g. dimid to the NC_DIM_INFO_T
object. These global vectors exist for dimensions, types, and groups
because they have globally unique id numbers.
WARNING:
1. since libsrc4 and libsrchdf4 share code, there are also
changes in libsrchdf4.
2. Any outstanding pull requests that change libsrc4 or libhdf4
are likely to cause conflicts with this code.
3. The original reason for doing this was for performance improvements,
but as noted elsewhere, this may not be significant because
the meta-data read performance apparently is being dominated
by the hdf5 library because we do bulk meta-data reading rather
than lazy reading.
(I hope) metadata mechanism. This mostly just adds new pieces of
code (e.g. nclistmap) and does some minor fixes.
It should be transparent to everything else.
The next set of changes will be the big step.
Specific changes:
1. Add dap4 code: libdap4 and dap4_test.
Note that until the d4ts server problem is solved, dap4 is turned off.
2. Modify various files to support dap4 flags:
configure.ac, Makefile.am, CMakeLists.txt, etc.
3. Add nc_test/test_common.sh. This centralizes
the handling of the locations of various
things in the build tree: e.g. where is
ncgen.exe located. See nc_test/test_common.sh
for details.
4. Modify .sh files to use test_common.sh
5. Obsolete separate oc2 by moving it to be part of
netcdf-c. This means replacing code with netcdf-c
equivalents.
5. Add --with-testserver to configure.ac to allow
override of the servers to be used for --enable-dap-remote-tests.
6. There were multiple versions of nctypealignment code. Try to
centralize in libdispatch/doffset.c and include/ncoffsets.h
7. Add a unit test for the ncuri code because of its complexity.
8. Move the findserver code out of libdispatch and into
a separate, self contained program in ncdap_test and dap4_test.
9. Move the dispatch header files (nc{3,4}dispatch.h) to
.../include because they are now shared by modules.
10. Revamp the handling of TOPSRCDIR and TOPBUILDDIR for shell scripts.
11. Make use of MREMAP if available
12. Misc. minor changes e.g.
- #include <config.h> -> #include "config.h"
- Add some no-install headers to /include
- extern -> EXTERNL and vice versa as needed
- misc header cleanup
- clean up checking for misc. unix vs microsoft functions
13. Change copyright decls in some files to point to LICENSE file.
14. Add notes to RELEASENOTES.md
