Re: Unofficial support for Cygwin

Hi Arlindo,

> Steve: I believe the cygwin patches to netcdf I contributed before:
> 
>   http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/glimpse/netcdfgroup-list/1182
> 
> never made into the netcdf official sources.  I haven't seen Randy's
> patches but if they are like my earlier ones they are very minimal.
> This would avoid people having to duplicate efforts everytime
> a new netcdf release is out.

It was an oversight on our part that your patches didn't get into the
official sources.  One of your changes was to cfortran.h, a file that
we don't maintain, so we don't ordinarily modify that.  We do have a
newer version of cfortran.h in the netCDF 3.5 beta than was in netCDF
3.4, so the change you made might not be necessary or it might require
additional changes.  If we needed to change cfortran.h, it would be
better to get Burkhard Burow, the cfortran.h maintainer, to include
that fix in his sources.

We don't have a Cygwin environment here to test these on.  Would it be
possible for you to determine if your change still works for the
netCDF-3.5 beta version, available from

  ftp://ftp.unidata.ucar.edu/pub/netcdf/netcdf-3.5-beta2.tar.Z

I'd like to find a way to support Cygwin in netCDF 3.5 before we
release it.

> Cygwin built netcdf libraries are a lot more useful to port Unix
> software to Windows than the MSVC port Unidata (unofficially)
> supports. It would be a great thing if you could accomodate this.
> BTW, my previous cygwin patches also allowed netcdf 3.4 to
> compile under MS-DOS with DJGPP, see
> 
>  http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/glimpse/netcdfgroup-list/1219
> 
> I've used this to port GrADS to both Win32 and MS-DOS. They have
> been thoroughly tested.

Thanks again for pointing out the problem.

--Russ