Hi James,
It just happens that I'm in Boulder CO today, meeting with the folks
at Unidata. I'll get a feel for the complexity of this task.
If I provide help, is there anyone on the list who would be
interested in working on this?
Unfortunately I have to work at home this morning until an appliance
gets repaired. But I would be happy to answer any questions about
this, either by email or when I get back into work this afternoon. I
mostly integrated the large file support into the netCDF 3.6 C
library, using a patch originally created by Greg Sjaardema of Sandia
labs. Ed Hartnett also helped with the testing, documentation, and
autotools stuff, so he knows everything about detecting what's needed
in terms of compile-time flags. There's also a lot of relevant
information in this netCDF large-file FAQ I wrote:
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/netcdf/docs/faq.html#Large%
20File%20Support