[ferret_users] Libraries in the latest Ferret

[Karl.Smith@xxxxxxxx]

Dear Ferreters,

As Martin pointed out, the latest release of Ferret does require more
system shared-object libraries than previous versions.  This is because
we are not statically linking in system libraries.  RedHat strongly
discourages static linking of system libraries:

http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Developer_Guide/lib.compatibility.static.html

One of the best reasons mentioned is that important security updates
will not be seen if the program uses static system libraries.  One of
the system libraries used, libcurl, is the library of functions uses for
interacting with the internet.  We definitely do not want to be locked
into a particular version of this library.

The libraries required by Ferret are almost always present and required
for any Linux system to function.  The one possible exception is the
gfortran library that Martin mentions.  There is an issue of which major
version number is needed for two of these libraries (libcurl and
libgfortran).  This is why we now have RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
version 5) and RHEL6 versions of the program.

The RHEL6 version also works fine under Ubuntu-10.10 and Mandriva-2010.2.


Happy Ferreting,
Karl Smith

-- 
Karl M. Smith, Ph.D.
Research Scientist and Software Developer
UW/JISAO and NOAA/PMEL/TMAP
karl.smith@xxxxxxxx

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