On Thu, 4 Apr 2002, Mary Haley wrote:
Mary:
>
> Hi Jeff,
>
> Thanks for sharing your comments. We always appreciate them.
>
> > BTW: What's the reason that NCAR doesn't open the NCL source? After all,
> > the binaries are given away for free.
> > .
> > .
> > .
>
> We plan to release it someday, but another reason we are not releasing
> it right now is because it is a difficult package to build. At this
> point, it would probably create a lot of grief for users trying to
> build it. The difficulty partially stems from the number of external
> packages that are required (netCDF, HDF, Spherepack, LAPACK, BLAS,
> flex). You need to build all of these before you can build NCL. Also,
> the fact that you can import shared objects into NCL adds another
> level of difficulty in compilation. You have to understand how shared
> objects work, and built the "ncl" executable with the appropriate
> options.
I'm happy to hear that it's in the plans. I think the build process will
actually get easier if you open the source - this is the first thing
people will work on and contribute to. As long as the binaries are
available, 95% of the people will use those - it's only the geeks (like
me) who will try to build from source. My experience as a fink developer
porting unix software to OS X is that open source software is now much
easier to install on OS X than it was 6 months ago, largely because of the
patches we have sent upstream.
BTW: I'll be working on getting loadable shared modules ("bundles" on
OSX) working in NCL - I'll let you know when I have something that works.
>
> We always appreciate user input. If other users are longing for NCL
> source code, don't hesitate to let us know (via ncl-talk). This may
> push the issue through faster.
I don't know of any right now, but I'm sure you're user base will expand
significantly when this does happen.
Thanks for responding, and for providing this great tool for the
community.
-Jeff
-- Jeffrey S. Whitaker Phone : (303)497-6313 Meteorologist FAX : (303)497-6449 NOAA/OAR/CDC R/CDC1 Email : jsw AT cdc.noaa.gov 325 Broadway Web : www.cdc.noaa.gov/~jsw Boulder, CO, USA 80303-3328 Office : Skaggs Research Cntr 1D-124
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