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Mary, > I just recently built netCDF 3.5.0 on seven different types of systems > at NCAR, and was getting ready to announce it to the users so they > could begin testing it. As you probably saw, Charlie Zender found a > problem with one of the include files in my test installations, which > you guys fixed in 3.5.1-beta. Charlie is asking me to bag 3.5.0 and > install 3.5.1-beta instead, but I wanted to check with you first. > > Is 3.5.1-beta a stable version, or should I stay with 3.5.0? Charlie > thinks he may have found a problem with 3.5.0 on prospect (Compaq > Alpha), so if you think 3.5.1-beta is the way to go, I may wait until > this problem is fixed as well. 3.5.1-beta is stable as far as features and functionality are concerned; it is just meant to fix some known problems with 3.5.0 described at: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/packages/netcdf/known_problems.html The remaining work for 3.5.1 is just handling problems with building netCDF from source, such as making sure the C++ interface compiles on various C++ compilers. If most of your users will be using installed binaries and installed libraries, then you don't care much about these portability issues and can make whatever tweaks are necessary to the source to make it compile and have the tests run on each platform. In particular, you don't need to worry about whether the sources compile using cc vs gcc or f77 vs g77, for example; as long as you can find one environment under which the sources can be built and installed on each platform, that's sufficient. We just have to worry about those portability issues before we can make 3.5.1. Something else that might influence your decision is when 3.5.1 will be released. I'm not sure, but I'm hoping for getting it out in about a month. Nobody is actively working on it now, but we are set up to do the necessary testing soon. --Russ