## 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*.
re: Issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2656
Charlie Zender notes that *nc_open()* does not immediately detect that the given path refers to a file not in zarr format. Rather it fails later when trying to read the (meta-)data.
The reason is that the Zarr format is highly decentralized. There is no easily testable magic number or superblock to look for. In effect the only way to see if a directory is Zarr is to successfully read it.
It is possible to heuristically detect that a path refers to an NCZarr/Zarr file by doing a breadth-first search of the file tree starting at the given path. If the search encounters a file whose name starts with ".z", then assume it is a legitimate NCZarr/Zarr file. Of course, this test could be costly. One hopes that in practice that it is not.
In addition to this fix, a corresponding test case was added.
## Other Changes
re: PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2529
There was an error under Cygwin for this PR that is fixed in this PR. The fix was to convert all *noinst_* references to *check_*.
This is a reference to an issue with how most distribution packagers
run autotools (source in one directory, compile in another, install
to a third.
There was a PR to catch errors in that kind of build by running
make distcheck; this should do the relevant bits of that PR,
taking into account the preference for separate build and compile
steps.
re: Issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2573
The file type inferencer in libdispatch/dinference.c has a simple
forward inference mechanism so that the occurrence of certain mode
values in a URL fragment implies inclusion of additional mode values.
This kind of inference is notorious for leading to cycles if not
careful. Unfortunately, this occurred in the one in dinference.c.
This was fixed by providing a more complicated, but more reliable inference
mechanism.
## Misc. Other Changes
* Found and fixed a couple of memory leaks.
* There is a recent problem in building HDF4 support on github actions. Fixed by using the internal HDF4 xdr capability.
* Some filter-related code was not being properly ifdef'd with ENABLE_NCZARRA_FILTERS.
re: PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2492
re: Issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2494
This PR fixes some problems with the pull request https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2492 in response to Issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2494.
* Found and fixed more scalar handling problems and add a test case for scalars.
* Cleanup nczarr_test/run_string.sh test
* Document *_nczarr_default_maxstrlen* and *_nczarr_maxstrlen*.
* Support both "Nan" and *Nan* as being floating point constants
for attributes. It is unclear from the Zarr V2 spec if
unquoted *Nan* is legal or not, but support for reading.
Write the quoted versions when writing an attribute. Similar
for Infinity constants.
So NCZarr supports the following constants for use in Attributes
* *Nan*, "Nan", *-Nan*, "-Nan"
* *Nanf*, "Nanf", *-Nanf*, "-Nanf"
* *Infinity*, "Infinity", *-Infinity*, "-Infinity"
* *Infinityf*, "Infinityf", *-Infinityf*, "-Infinityf"
* re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2278
* re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2485
* re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2474
This PR subsumes PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2278.
Actually is a bit an omnibus covering several issues.
## PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/2278
Add support for the Zarr string type.
Zarr strings are restricted currently to be of fixed size.
The primary issue to be addressed is to provide a way for user to
specify the size of the fixed length strings. This is handled by providing
the following new attributes special:
1. **_nczarr_default_maxstrlen** —
This is an attribute of the root group. It specifies the default
maximum string length for string types. If not specified, then
it has the value of 64 characters.
2. **_nczarr_maxstrlen** —
This is a per-variable attribute. It specifies the maximum
string length for the string type associated with the variable.
If not specified, then it is assigned the value of
**_nczarr_default_maxstrlen**.
This PR also requires some hacking to handle the existing netcdf-c NC_CHAR
type, which does not exist in zarr. The goal was to choose numpy types for
both the netcdf-c NC_STRING type and the netcdf-c NC_CHAR type such that
if a pure zarr implementation read them, it would still work and an
NC_CHAR type would be handled by zarr as a string of length 1.
For writing variables and NCZarr attributes, the type mapping is as follows:
* "|S1" for NC_CHAR.
* ">S1" for NC_STRING && MAXSTRLEN==1
* ">Sn" for NC_STRING && MAXSTRLEN==n
Note that it is a bit of a hack to use endianness, but it should be ok since for
string/char, the endianness has no meaning.
For reading attributes with pure zarr (i.e. with no nczarr
atribute types defined), they will always be interpreted as of
type NC_CHAR.
## Issue: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2474
This PR partly fixes this issue because it provided more
comprehensive support for Zarr attributes that are JSON valued expressions.
This PR still does not address the problem in that issue where the
_ARRAY_DIMENSION attribute is incorrectly set. Than can only be
fixed by the creator of the datasets.
## Issue: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2485
This PR also fixes the scalar failure shown in this issue.
It generally cleans up scalar handling.
It also adds a note to the documentation describing that
NCZarr supports scalars while Zarr does not and also how
scalar interoperability is achieved.
## Misc. Other Changes
1. Convert the nczarr special attributes and keys to be all lower case. So "_NCZARR_ATTR" now used "_nczarr_attr. Support back compatibility for the upper case names.
2. Cleanup my too-clever-by-half handling of scalars in libnczarr.
