[ncl-install] Trying to download/install ncl/ncarg

[Dennis Shea]

offline: FYI only

The "NCL people" do not like requiring users to register/login either.
They have wanted to remove the register/login requirement for some time.
It is "annoying" and it does "cause issues for distributions."

However .....

While NCL is 'free' to the public but it involves substantial costs
to NCAR. The computing division (CISL) requires 'metrics' to justify the
costs (ie, salaries) associated with creating, maintaining and
supporting a tool like NCL. Last year: 4000+ emails: 98+% answered.
Many questions involve staff spending time looking at and fixing
(even rewriting) scripts to help users. It is an enormous time sink.
To my knowledge, *no other tool provides the level of support
that NCL does*.

CISL knows that NCL is heavily used. After all, NCL is the
"official" support  tool for the CESM model and the primary tool
for WRF support.  It is the only tool that seemlessly (ie addfile)
can span netCDF-3/4, GRIB-1/2 and  HDF-4/5 [http://hdfeos.org/zoo/], etc.

The reason CISL wants metrics is that the main funding
agency (NSF) wants them. Sigh!

--
That said, I think the 'NCL people' will likely again request that the
register/login requirement be removed. NCL's long history of use and
existing large user base should justify any costs.

Cheers
D

=====
P.S. Orion ... THX for jumping in and answering some of the
install questions. It is appreciated.


On 3/7/14, 8:15 PM, Orion Poplawski wrote:
> On 03/07/2014 02:59 PM, Jenny Fox - NOAA Federal wrote:
>> I used the wget script to download the file, but when I check the file
>> type I get:
>>
>> file ncl_ncarg-6.1.2.Linux_RHEL5.6_x86_64_gcc412.tar.gz
>> ncl_ncarg-6.1.2.Linux_RHEL5.6_x86_64_gcc412.tar.gz: ASCII HTML document
>> text, with very long lines, with CRLF line terminators
>>
>> —jenny
>
>
> Take a look at the contents of what you download, you'll probably see
> what's up.  I don't think wget is going to work because you need to log
> into the site to download.  I find this annoying as well - it causes
> issue for distributions.
>
> - Orion
>
>