Bug#853750: hdfview: HDF5 files appear empty

[Mark Hymers]

On Tue, 31, Jan, 2017 at 04:27:12PM +0100, Giuseppe Bilotta spoke thus..
> Package: hdfview
> Version: 2.11.0+dfsg-2+b1
> Severity: important
> 
> The current version of hdfview does not show the content of any of my
> HDF5 files.
> 
> Downgrading to the 2.9-3+b2 version of libjhdf{4,5}-{java, jni}, which
> also installs libhdf5-8 version 1.8.13+docs-15, seems to fix the issue
> for me, even if hdfview is kept at the 2.11 version. This seems to
> suggest that the problem lies in libjhdf rather than in hdfview itself,
> and/or in the API of libhdf5 used by jhdf.
> 
> FWIW, a similar bug seems to affect also jhdf 2.9-5 as found in Ubuntu,
> which is using libhdf5-10 (1.8.16), which would further support the idea
> of a breaking API change between version 1.8.13 and 1.8.16 of libhdf5.

I've been looking into this.  It appears that between HDF5-1.8 and
HDF5-1.10, the size of object identifiers was changed from 32- to
64-bit.

Unfortunately, by the HDF group's own admission, there is no version
of hdfview (and presumably the java libraries it comes with) which has
been updated for this.  See https://support.hdfgroup.org/products/java/

Unless someone can suggest a solution, I suspect that this bug needs
to be upgraded to release-critical as it makes the package completely
useless.

Thanks,

Mark

-- 
Mark Hymers <mhy at debian dot org>

"Everyone is entitled to be stupid but some abuse the privilege."
     Unknown