Hi Daryl-
Thanks for your comments about binary builds. I'll try to clarify
Unidata's position on this.
When Unidata released GEMPAK 5.11.1 in December 2007, we produced binary
builds. The majority of the support questions after that release were
related to incompatibilities of the binaries with the system libraries.
Sometimes, tracking down these issues was very time consuming. In most
cases, building GEMPAK from source solved the issues related to binary
builds.
After discussions with the Unidata User's Committee and Policy
Committees, the UPC decided that providing source only distributions in
the future was warranted because:
- As operating systems move forward, the binary builds will likely
become incompatible with newer libraries.
- The UPC does not have access to the wide range of systems that are
currently being used in the GEMPAK community.
- The UPC does not have the resources to continually produce binary
releases with each source change.
Both committees endorsed this action.
The source only distributions have been a (re)learning experience for
the users and the UPC. While on the one hand, the scope of the support
questions has changed, the problems are usually very similiar -
incompatible or missing libraries. GEMPAK 5.11.4 was a major change in
the structure of the GEMPAK source tree, and it has caused some build
problems on our end. Fortunately, the gembud community has helped us
address these. We appreciate those of you in the gembud community who
are willing to provide help to the UPC and others.
As we move forward, the following actions are being taken:
- a discussion of GEMPAK support will be held during the upcoming User's
Committee meeting (March 11-12, 2010).
- We will be beefing up the GEMPAK build documentation to include more
information about frequently encountered problems as well as solutions
and/or workarounds.
- We have contacted NCEP about providing access to the source code in a
repository fashion. Currently, Unidata does not have the rights to
distribute the software in this fashion. NCEP requires us to have users
register to download the software. If we are able to set up a
repository access, we will be looking for some experienced community
members to vet any changes before they are committed to the repository.
- We could set up an area in our downloads section where site
contributed binaries would be accessible. Several sites have provided
precompiled binaries for compatible systems that we don't have access
to. These would be provided on an "as is" basis.
As the migration to AWIPS II progresses, we expect the gembud community
to take a more active role in support of the legacy GEMPAK code. Unidata
plans to support the last version of the current GEMPAK/NAWIPS software
for 18 months after the first official release of AWIPS II by NCEP to
the National Centers and to the Unidata community. The GEMPAK source
code will still be accessible in some form after the UPC ends official
support. It will not stop working on any certain date. Furthermore, the
existing support materials (tutorial, help manual and documentation)
will still be available on line. The gembud mailing list will be kept
active so GEMPAK users can provide community support to each other.
Please see the NAWIPS Migration Information at:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/gempak/nawipsmigration/
for additional information on GEMPAK and AWIPS II.
On 02/18/2010 08:33 AM, daryl herzmann wrote:
Hello Jason,
I wish Unidata would state a reason why they no longer produce GEMPAK
binaries, but regardless, we are left with all this compiling fun.
Looking at your Centos Errors, netcdf is not building for reasons I
have yet to figure out (appears it requires a lot of tetex stuff to
build docs). I ended up hacking in netcdf 4.1 to help it to build
cleaner with gfortran.
<personal rant>
I sure wish Unidata would support public source code trees and
revision systems of GEMPAK, so the community could actively help
develop it. Unfortunately, Unidata doesn't develop code in an open
manner. We have to wait for it to "come from on high", a.k.a the 13th
floor of the Unidata tower, hehe!
</personal rant>
Anyway, I know others on this list are producing RPMs, so hopefully
they'll have something to share with you. My RPM foo is not strong
enough to provide binaries for RHEL and RHEL clones yet.
I ended up installing: tetex-dvips , openmotif-devel, texinfo, tetex
and got it to work, I think.
daryl
