Anyway, I repaired it as follows:
1. Created NC4_write_provenance as parallel to NC4_read_provenance
2. Modified hdf5file.c to use NC4_write_provenance
3. Modified hdf5open.c to use NC4_read_provenance (was NC4_read_ncproperties).
4. The creation of the _NCProperties string was seriously hosed:
was using all the wrong fields.