cannot compile with hdf5

[Ivan Sutoris]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 7:30 AM, John W. Eaton <jwe at octave.org> wrote:
> On  4-Feb-2009, Ivan Sutoris wrote:
>
> | I've had similar problem recently, and after bit of searching I've
> | found that possible workaround for compiling with HDF 1.8 is to
> | specify a compatibility flag:
> |   ./configure CPPFLAGS="-DH5_USE_16_API"
> | This has also been already mentioned before in Octave lists [1],[2].
> | Since Octave supports only older interface to HDF, maybe it would be
> | better to always define this flag in configure script?
>
> OK, if we decide to stick with the v1.6 API, then I don't think it can
> hurt to always define H5_USE_16_API before including hdf5.h.   But
> maybe we should also check to see whether the HDF5 library has the
> v1.6 API symbols and disable HDF if not.  I propose the patch attached
> below.  It seems to work for me.  If it fails for you, then please
> submit a patch...
>
> BTW, I started looking at this to see if there might be some simple
> way to support both the old and new API, but it seems complicated to
> me.  And a lot of the API changes seem to be adding parameters that
> are not even used yet.  Ugh.  So I gave up.  It would be nice to have
> changes for Octave so that it could compile with the new API, but I
> don't want to switch exclusively to that yet as long as the new
> version is not more widely used (Debian doesn't seem to have a package
> for it, for example).  So we will need to be able to support both
> versions at once.  Maybe someone with some time and knowledge of HDF5
> will take on this task because I have no plans to do it.
>
> jwe

Thanks for the reply, I've compiled recent tip (with your patch) with
HDF5 1.8.1 (package hdf5-devel from openSUSE repos) succesfully
without any configure flags, so it seems to work.

Regards
Ivan Sutoris