science/hdf5 ABI broken

[Steve Kargl]

On Mon, May 30, 2016 at 09:12:46PM +0200, Alphons van Werven wrote:
> Steve Kargl wrote:
> 
> > Please supply either a science/hdf5-1.8 port, revert the 1.10.0
> > update, or consider the above patches.
> 
> Sounds like a job for the port's maintainer...
> 
> % make -C /usr/ports/science/hdf5 maintainer
> 

There is a patch for the Makefile, so I'm well aware of the
maintainer line.  I'm going under the assumption that if one
is a maintainer, then s/he will be reading this list.  I'm
also going on the assumption that users of the hdf5 port cannot
magically read the maintainer's email.  You can take my original
post as public service for the users of hdf5.  I'll note that
there are 2 bug reports about the breakage:

[Bug 209242] math/matio broken by science/hd5 upgrade to 1.10  
[Bug 209244] math/scilab broken by science/hd5 upgrade to 1.10 

I doubt that the patches proposed in these PR apply to any 
Fortran codes, but I'm too disinterested to investigate further. 

I suspect that the breakage is going to affect more ports, and for
the users of these port they may not even be aware of problem (i.e.,
they may produce corrupt data with no obvious warning or error).

The very first entry under "New Features" in the Release Notes
for HDF5 1.10.0 is

    - API Compatibility with HDF5 1.8 Flag Was Added

      The 1.10 version of the HDF5 Library can be configured to operate
      identically to the 1.8 library with the --with-default-api-version=v18
      configure flag. This allows existing code to be compiled with the 1.10
      library without requiring immediate changes to the application source
      code. For addtional configuration options and other details, see
      "API Compatibility Macros in HDF5" at
      https://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/doc/RM/APICompatMacros.html.

This doesn't give one too much confidence that the maintainer actually
looked at the documentation.  S/he simply assumed that a point release
update from 1.8.16 to 1.10.0 did not change the ABI/API.

-- 
Steve