Re: 20040414: Attribute modification in Java2.1 NetCDF API

>To: address@hidden
>From: "Steve Loch" <sgl@xxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Attribute modification in Java2.1 NetCDF API
>Organization: British Oceanographic Data Centre
>Keywords: 200404141623.i3EGNSCT021650 netCDF 

Steve,

> Thanks for the info. As indicated I had inkling of these routines
> gleaned from some correspondence between yourself and Chuck Denham but
> the system I have doesn't have the man pages installed! The obvious
> question is why are they  not documented in the User Guide?!

I believe these were added after the last edition of the User Guide
for C and Fortran-77 were generated (in June 1997).  The later F90
User Guide was based on these earlier Guides and it was an oversight
not to update it to include the "underbar underbar" functions.

Why the C and Fortran User Guides weren't updated is a longer story.
They were written using FrameMaker and auxiliary programs to generate
HTML and PDF versions from the FrameMaker source.  We lost our
FrameMaker expert and the software wasn't updated for all the
platforms we used, so it became difficult to update the original
FrameMaker source and get a new version of the HTML and PDF manuals
generated. 

We've recently  fixed this problem by discarding the FrameMaker
sources of the User Guides after converting them to texinfo, which we
will use henceforth to generate the other versions.  We're now close to
being able to update all the documentation to the current state of
the software, and hope release new versions of the documentation with
the 3.6.0 software.  I'll make sure the new User Guides include
documentation for nc__create(), nc__open(), and nc__enddef() and the
analogous Fortran functions.

--Russ