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On 2004.04.26 17:36 Russ Rew wrote:
You may be right, but for the initial release I'd prefer to choose and support only one profile. How can I do this in a way that avoids lock in and permits future extensions?
I was waiting for wiser heads than mine to reply to this! :-) I think that part of what I'm driving at is an effort to provide users with a good conceptual framework for how this multi-purpose library works. Part of the approach would be to explicitly state the approach (similar to what I say above). Initially, there are two profiles: whatever netCDF4 supports, and a netCDF3 compatibility profile. (If you count "netCDF plus raw HDF5 calls", there is a third profile.) Within the file format, it may be necessary to store something that says "this file conforms to profile x, y, and z". I don't know if this kind of message makes sense in the core definition of netCDF, or if it is some kind of convention.I could even imagine query functions, e.g., "can this file/object be interpreted
as netCDF3?"Probably the most important thing is to avoid the impression that "this is
the only legal way to do it in netCDF4", unless we really mean to never extend it.This is starting to sound complicated, but I think this is what users are
going to face.
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