## 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: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2117
re: https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2119
* Modify libsrc to allow byte-range reading of netcdf-3 files in private S3 buckets; this required using the aws sdk. Also add a test case.
* The aws sdk can sometimes cause problems if the Awd::ShutdownAPI function is not called. So at optional atexit() support to ensure it is called. This is disabled for Windows.
* Add documentation to nczarr.md on how to build and use the aws sdk under windows. Currently it builds, but testing fails.
* Switch testing from stratus to the Unidata bucket on S3.
* Improve support for the s3: url protocol.
* Add a s3 specific utility code file: ds3util.c
* Modify NC_infermodel to attempt to read the magic number of byte-ranged files in S3.
## Misc.
* Move and rename the core S3 SDK wrapper code (libnczarr/zs3sdk.cpp) to libdispatch since it now used in libsrc as well as libnczarr.
* Add calls to nc_finalize in the utilities in case atexit is disabled.
* Add header only json parser to the distribution rather than as a built source.
## 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.
re: https://github.com/zarr-developers/zarr-specs/issues/41
After discussions with the Zarr community, it was decided to
convert to a new representation of the NCZarr meta-data extensions: version 2.
These extensions store information necessary to mapping the Zarr data model
to the netcdf-4 data model.
The basic change is to remove the NCZarr specific objects: .nczarr, .nczgroup, .nczarray, and .nczattr.
The contents of these objects is moved into the corresponding existing Zarr objects as special keys. The mapping is as follows:
* ''.nczarr'' => ''/.zgroup/_NCZARR_SUPERBLOCK_''
* ''.nczgroup => ''.zgroup/_NCZARR_GROUP_''
* ''.nczarray => ''.zarray/_NCZARR_ARRAY_''
* ''.nczattr => ''.zattr/_NCZARR_ATTR_''
Backward compatibility is maintained by looking for the object ''/.nczarr''
and if found, then assuming that the dataset is in the older version 1 format.
This compatibility only supports reading of such version 1 datasets.
Documentation and test cases are also added.
Misc. Other Changes:
1. The json parsing code was added to the general library instead of nczarr only (ncjson.c, ncjson.h).
2. Improved support for different platform paths by allowing conversion
to a single common path representation.
3. Add some new error codes.
4. Modify nccopy usage to mention the new chunking specification.
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.
re: issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/1251
Assume that you have the URL to a remote dataset
which is a normal netcdf-3 or netcdf-4 file.
This PR allows the netcdf-c to read that dataset's
contents as a netcdf file using HTTP byte ranges
if the remote server supports byte-range access.
Originally, this PR was set up to access Amazon S3 objects,
but it can also access other remote datasets such as those
provided by a Thredds server via the HTTPServer access protocol.
It may also work for other kinds of servers.
Note that this is not intended as a true production
capability because, as is known, this kind of access to
can be quite slow. In addition, the byte-range IO drivers
do not currently do any sort of optimization or caching.
An additional goal here is to gain some experience with
the Amazon S3 REST protocol.
This architecture and its use documented in
the file docs/byterange.dox.
There are currently two test cases:
1. nc_test/tst_s3raw.c - this does a simple open, check format, close cycle
for a remote netcdf-3 file and a remote netcdf-4 file.
2. nc_test/test_s3raw.sh - this uses ncdump to investigate some remote
datasets.
This PR also incorporates significantly changed model inference code
(see the superceded PR https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/pull/1259).
1. It centralizes the code that infers the dispatcher.
2. It adds support for byte-range URLs
Other changes:
1. NC_HDF5_finalize was not being properly called by nc_finalize().
2. Fix minor bug in ncgen3.l
3. fix memory leak in nc4info.c
4. add code to walk the .daprc triples and to replace protocol=
fragment tag with a more general mode= tag.
Final Note:
Th inference code is still way too complicated. We need to move
to the validfile() model used by netcdf Java, where each
dispatcher is asked if it can process the file. This decentralizes
the inference code. This will be done after all the major new
dispatchers (PIO, Zarr, etc) have been implemented.
