Re: trying to install ncl and nco on ubuntu or centos

Hi Dave,

I can't speak for NCO, UDUNITS, and NCVIEW as we don't develop these
packages. I'll answer about NCL.

We are currently unable to provide packages for all the different
systems you list, partially because we don't have access to all of the
systems you listed.

Mostly, however, we can't do this because we require that users get
NCL via the ESG website. And this, in turn, requires that you login to
get the software. This makes it impossible to use for LINUX package
distributors.

The reason we require downloading via the ESG is that we need
meaningful metrics on who's downloading the software. These metrics
are reported (indirectly) back to NSF, our funder, to show the impact
NCL has on scientific research. Without these metrics, NSF could
potentially decide to discontinue our funding.

We are currently looking into whether we can still use the ESG to
gather meaningful metrics, but have it so that it doesn't always
require a password for getting NCL.

There are people out there who have taken it upon themselves to create
package distros for NCL, and this counts against us as we are then
unable to get metrics from those downloads. However, we realize this
is a valuable service, so we look the other way.

Meanwhile, you said you were trying to build from source code. We
provide several binaries for various LINUX systems; have you tried one
of these?

--Mary

On Nov 18, 2010, at 11:52 AM, David Burns wrote:

> I have some users that want ncl, nco, ncview, and udunits. We mostly
> use centos, which does have ncl and udunits packages, but nothing
> for nco and ncview. I noticed that ubuntu does have packages for nco
> and ncview, but not for ncl or udunits. I think fedora has them all,
> or at least used to, and centos used to. We used to use fedora, but
> the frequent release of kernels and short lifetime of each version
> had us always trying to catch up, so we switched to centos, because
> it is very similar but they promise to support each version much
> longer.
>
> I've also tried compiling from source, with discouraging results.
> Without the packaging system to help me, dependencies cause a big
> problem.
>
> I'm not sure even what to ask at this point - how do I support these
> users? Should I volunteer to make packages (I have no experience)?
> Make them use a virtual machine with ubuntu installed for stuff
> available on that platform only?
>
> thanks,
> Dave
>
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Received on Thu Nov 18 12:12:21 2010