Re: I would like to contribute a netCDF utility.

> Organization: UCSD
> Keywords: 199405032325.AA00296

Hi David,

> I have written a netCDF program which I would like to upload to your 
> 'contrib' directory, as I think it is generally useful for users of 
> the netCDF standard.  Please let me know the appropriate directory 
> to upload it to.  For reference, here is the README for it:
> - ------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Ncview 1.30  May 3, 1994 -- David W. Pierce
> - -------------------------------------------
> 
> Overview: What Ncview *is*.
> - ---------------------------
> This is the source for "ncview", a X Windows (Release 4 or higher) 
> visual browser for netCDF data format files.  Ncview displays a 
> 2-dimensional, color representation of single precision floating
> point data in a netCDF file.  You can animate the data in time (making
> simple movies), flip or enlarge the picture, scan through various axes, 
> change colormaps, etc.
> 

Thanks, this sounds great.  

Although I've never gotten around to posting any conditions for software in
the netcdf/contrib directory, I have written some criteria into the
"User-Contributed Software" section of the WWW document at the URL
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/utilities.html#User-Contributed 
Software

    The criteria for software or documentation that are appropriate for the
    netcdf/contrib/ directory are:

     o General usefulness to a significant part of the netCDF community 
     o Small size 
     o Infrequent need for updates 
     o Free availability 

It sounds like your software meets all these criteria, assuming it's not
several megabytes.  For software that does not meet these criteria, I
recommend instead just putting a reference to where the latest version of
the software can be found, and letting the developer keep it up-to-date so
we aren't involved in synchronizing what we make available with frequent
revisions.  

I have made the anonymous FTP directory incoming/pierce/ world writable on
buddy.unidata.ucar.edu for a while, so you can upload the software.  Please
let me know when it's there, because we can't leave world-writable FTP
directories available for long or our disks get filled up by people looking
for free places to store big files (this has happened!).

If there are multiple directories or lots of files, you will presumably want
to provide a tar file or compressed tar file.  I'll let you know when this is
in the contrib directory, and you can see if the way it's packaged and the
sort description I provide in the overview README and web document are
suitable.

When you have agreed everything looks OK, one of us should announce this to
users via the netcdfgroup mailing list.  If you want to announce it with your
README file, that would be fine.  If you would rather I announce it, I would
probably send out a general announcement of the existence of the contrib
directory (which has never been announced on the netcdfgroup mailing list),
along with brief descriptions of the software that's there and a note that
your software has just been added.

Thanks again for developing and sharing your software with other netCDF
users.

__________________________________________________________________________
                      
Russ Rew                                              UCAR Unidata Program
address@hidden                                        P.O. Box 3000
(303)497-8645                                 Boulder, Colorado 80307-3000