Bonjour, Thank you for your comments Steve, Rich, Russ, and Martin. I'll wait a day or two longer for others to weigh-in before considering how best to proceed. In the interim, I can respond to some specific issues/suggestions and disentangle them from larger concerns.
I'll post my responses as replies to each message, rather than aggregating them. Aggregation has its uses, mind you, but e-mail responses is maybe not the best. Steve's message was first so he gets this header. Your "philosophical" point is a good one. It's why I bought a Panasonic VHS/CD/DVD/Blu-Ray player. Didn't want to throw away my Disney VHS movies! Yet while Panasonic makes it hard to record from Blu-Ray back to VHS, we can make flattening netCDF4->netCDF3 easy. I like your suggestion of "dot-appending" the name hierarchy. I will add this to the NCO TODO list. Currently NCO flattens group files by assuming no namespace conflicts and placing everything into the root group: http://nco.sf.net/nco.html#gpe When conflicts arise it fails. Your suggestion guarantees no conflicts and makes sense. Are there any other tools that already do this? In any case, maybe this would ease some interoperability concerns. In fact interoperability is one of my greatest motivations for pushing "group-aware" standards---I hate seeing graduate students struggle with the hoops and loops necessary to compare (usually flat netCDF) models to eachother and to (hierarchical HDF) observations. cz -- Charlie Zender, Earth System Sci. & Computer Sci. University of California, Irvine 949-891-2429 )'( _______________________________________________ CF-metadata mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata
