This PR started as an attempt to add unlimited dimensions to NCZarr.
It did that, but this exposed significant problems with test interference.
So this PR is mostly about fixing -- well mitigating anyway -- test
interference.
The problem of test interference is now documented in the document docs/internal.md.
The solutions implemented here are also describe in that document.
The solution is somewhat fragile but multiple cleanup mechanisms
are provided. Note that this feature requires that the
AWS command line utility must be installed.
## Unlimited Dimensions.
The existing NCZarr extensions to Zarr are modified to support unlimited dimensions.
NCzarr extends the Zarr meta-data for the ".zgroup" object to include netcdf-4 model extensions. This information is stored in ".zgroup" as dictionary named "_nczarr_group".
Inside "_nczarr_group", there is a key named "dims" that stores information about netcdf-4 named dimensions. The value of "dims" is a dictionary whose keys are the named dimensions. The value associated with each dimension name has one of two forms
Form 1 is a special case of form 2, and is kept for backward compatibility. Whenever a new file is written, it uses format 1 if possible, otherwise format 2.
* Form 1: An integer representing the size of the dimension, which is used for simple named dimensions.
* Form 2: A dictionary with the following keys and values"
- "size" with an integer value representing the (current) size of the dimension.
- "unlimited" with a value of either "1" or "0" to indicate if this dimension is an unlimited dimension.
For Unlimited dimensions, the size is initially zero, and as variables extend the length of that dimension, the size value for the dimension increases.
That dimension size is shared by all arrays referencing that dimension, so if one array extends an unlimited dimension, it is implicitly extended for all other arrays that reference that dimension.
This is the standard semantics for unlimited dimensions.
Adding unlimited dimensions required a number of other changes to the NCZarr code-base. These included the following.
* Did a partial refactor of the slice handling code in zwalk.c to clean it up.
* Added a number of tests for unlimited dimensions derived from the same test in nc_test4.
* Added several NCZarr specific unlimited tests; more are needed.
* Add test of endianness.
## Misc. Other Changes
* Modify libdispatch/ncs3sdk_aws.cpp to optionally support use of the
AWS Transfer Utility mechanism. This is controlled by the
```#define TRANSFER```` command in that file. It defaults to being disabled.
* Parameterize both the standard Unidata S3 bucket (S3TESTBUCKET) and the netcdf-c test data prefix (S3TESTSUBTREE).
* Fixed an obscure memory leak in ncdump.
* Removed some obsolete unit testing code and test cases.
* Uncovered a bug in the netcdf-c handling of big-endian floats and doubles. Have not fixed yet. See tst_h5_endians.c.
* Renamed some nczarr_tests testcases to avoid name conflicts with nc_test4.
* Modify the semantics of zmap\#ncsmap_write to only allow total rewrite of objects.
* Modify the semantics of zodom to properly handle stride > 1.
* Add a truncate operation to the libnczarr zmap code.
## 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/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.
re: Issue https://github.com/Unidata/netcdf-c/issues/2419
There are effectively two json subsystems in netcdf-c.
1. ncjson.[ch] in libnetcdf
2. netcdf_json.h for use by plugins so they can be built without need
for libnetcdf.
The netcdf_json.h file is constructed from the concatenation of
ncjson.h plus ncjson.c. It turned out that in doing this, I was
leaving some symbols externally visible so that if, for some
reason, a plugin was built and needed libnetcdf, then symbol
conflicts arose.
The solution is to prefix the declarations in ncjson.[ch] with a
macro (OPTSTATIC) that can be resolved to either nothing or to
"static". Then in netcdf_json.h, it resolves to "static" and
prevents the symbol conflicts.
Note that netcdf_json.h is constructed once in
netcdf-c/include/Makefile.am with the rule named
"makepluginjson". This means that it is included in the
distribution. However, this also means that if ncjson.[ch] is
changed, then it is necessary to invoke makepluginjson
explicitly to rebuild netcdf_json.h
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'
