HDF5 files appear empty

[Peter Würtz]

The HDF5 viewer "hdfview" is currently broken. All files opened by this application just appear empty.

As discussed in debian bugreport https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=853750 this is due to an incompatibility of HDF5 libraries HDF5-1.8 and HDF5-1.10. hdfview doesn't work with version 1.10.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.04
Package: hdfview 2.11.0+dfsg-2build1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.10.0-22.24-generic 4.10.15
Uname: Linux 4.10.0-22-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.4-0ubuntu4.1
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity:Unity7
Date: Wed Jun 7 16:56:03 2017
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-02-06 (121 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" - Release amd64 (20161012.2)
SourcePackage: jhdf
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to zesty on 2017-04-15 (53 days ago)

[Peter Würtz (pwuertz)]

With ubuntu shipping HDF libraries version 1.10, the only option is to bump hdfview to version 3 beta.

https://support.hdfgroup.org/products/java/release/hdfview3.html

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Václav Šmilauer (eudoxos)]

Severity of this bug should be raised accordingly, the package is completely useless and only confuses people.

[Markus J Schmidt (smiddy84)]

I contacted the HDF Group today and asked for a fix. Perhaps you can do the same:

https://www.hdfgroup.org/contact-us/

[Peter Würtz (pwuertz)]

@~smiddy84 As you can see from my comment 2 years ago, this problem has already been solved in HDF View 3. Ubuntu / Debian just didn't update their package since then.

I wish there was a way to flag packages as dead/abandoned so they can be removed from the distribution... instead of continuing to ship broken versions for 2 years, counting.

[Andrei Savici (saviciat)]

Still the same issue in Ubuntu 20.04 :(

[Lenin (gagarin)]

well the software was removed, which closes all its bugs. not fixed