stored in the _NCProperties attribute to allow two things:
1. capture of additional library dependencies (over and above
hdf5)
2. Recognition of non-netcdf libraries that create netcdf-4 format
files.
To this end, the _NCProperties format has been extended to be
and arbitrary set of key=value pairs separated by commas.
This new format has version = 2, and uses commas as the pair separator.
Thus the general form is:
_NCProperties = "version=2,key1=value,key2=value2..." ;
This new version is accompanied by a new ./configure option of the form
--with-ncproperties="key1=value1,key2=value2..."
that specifies pairs to add to the _NCProperties attribute for all
files created with that netcdf library.
At this point, what is missing is some programmatic way to
specify either all the pairs or additional pairs
to the _NCProperties attribute. Not sure of the best way
to do this.
Builders using non-netcdf libraries can specify
whatever they want in the key value pairs (as long
as the version=2 is specified first).
By convention, the primary library is expected to be the
the first pair after the leading version=2 pair, but this
is convention only and is neither required nor enforced.
Related changes:
1. Fixed the tests that check _NCProperties to properly operate with version=2.
2. When reading a version 1 _NCProperties attribute, convert it to look
like a version 2 attribute.
2. Added some version 2 tests to ncdump/tst_fileinfo.c and
ncdump/tst_fileinfo.sh
Misc Changes:
1. Fix minor problem in ncdap_test/testurl.sh where a parameter to
buildurl needed to be quoted.
2. Minor fix to ncgen to swap switches -H and -h to be consistent
with other utilities.
3. Document the -M flag in nccopy usage() and the nccopy man page.
4. Modify a test case to use the nccopy -M flag.
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.
Modified provenance code to allocate the minimal space
needed for _NCProperties attribute in file. Basically
required using malloc in the provenance code and in ncdump.
Otherwise should cause no externally visible effects.
Also removed the ENABLE_FILEINFO from configure.ac since
the provenance code is no longer optional.
re: github netcdf-c issue #271
This occurs for several reasons, including:
1. using H5Aopen_name instead of H5Aexists to test if attribute exists.
2. using H5Eset_auto instead of H5Eset_auto2.
There are probably others that will have to be extinguished as encountered.
p.s Hope I did not overdo this and kill too much.
Charlie Zender noted that we forgot to define what happens for
various netcdf API attribute operations, notably nc_inq_att()
and nc_get_att().
So, I added a list of legal and illegal api calls for the provenance
attributes in docs/attribute_conventions.md.
I also added more test cases to ncdump/tst_fileinfo.c to verify
and fixed resultant errors.
This consists of a persistent attribute named
_NCProperties plus two computed attributes
_IsNetcdf4 and _SuperblockVersion.
See the 'Provenance Attributes' section
of docs/attribute_conventions.md for details.
