INSTALL

INSTALL instructions for
High-Level HDF5: HL-HDF


Anders Henja and Daniel Michelson
Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute

September 2011

The installation of HL-HDF follows the traditional configure, make, make 
install sequence. 

Requirements:
- HDF5 library version 1.8.5-patch1 or higher (http://www.hdfgroup.org/HDF5)
- GNU zip (including zlib), version 1.1.0 or higher
- GNU tar
- GNU make version 3.7x or higher (or compatible)
- Python 2.6 final or 2.7.x, but not 3.x
- Numeric Python (NumPy) 1.2.1 or higher

Most, if not all, of these packages are available on any credible Linux 
distribution, and can be managed through package managers like yum, apt-get, 
and dpkg.

If you use pre-compiled packages that come along with your Linux
distribution, don't forget to install the respective "devel" 
package containing headers and libraries too.

Configure & Build
Most of the options for the configure is probably not nessecary to specify but
if you are uncertain, then type './configure --help' to get a list of all 
options.

The two options that might be nessecary to specify is the installation directory
and where the HDF5 library resides.

  ./configure --prefix=<where to install HLHDF> --with-hdf5=<HDF5 include files>,<HDF5 library files>

When the configuration has successfully be done, then it is time to build the 
software which is done with 'make'.

Example:
%> ./configure --prefix=/opt/HLHDF --with-hdf5=/opt/include,/opt/lib
%> make

Test
After the software has been built successfully, you can run the package's unit
tests to check the build's integrity. This is done through:
%> make test

Installation
Make sure that you have permissions to write files in the directory specified by
the --prefix directive during the configuration phase before typing:
%> make install

When HL-HDF is installed, you should add prefix/lib to your $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. 

Python-specific issues
You must be able to copy one file to your Python's site-packages 
directory! This is the pyhl/_pyhlmodule.so file.
However, if you are using a system-wide Python installation without write 
privileges to its site-packages directory, then you must set up a user 
site-packages directory and place this file there manually.
Instructions for this are found at http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0370/