April 2024- September 2024
Ward Fisher, Tara Drwenski, Ethan Davis
The netCDF team continues to work towards maintaining the sustainability and viability of the netCDF libraries. While facing challenges when prioritizing work against the resources available, we are fortunate to have an engaged community of users and developers.
The status of the netCDF team can be summarized as follows:
NetCDF is healthy and remains viable, but remaining so will require continued support from our community.
Our efforts to serve the community are reciprocated, through high levels of engagement and contributions, for which we are immensely grateful. The netCDF team lacks the resources to quickly evaluate every potentially useful emergent technology or address every bug report, and we must therefore triage based on what best serves our communities interests at large. We continue to advocate for our community through participation in external data-oriented/focused groups.
How can we encourage additional community engagement, from students and/or faculty? We benefit greatly from the involvement of our community, making netCDF truly a collaborative effort. How can we encourage/expand this collaboration? What makes it rewarding to engage with the netCDF developers?
With the retirement of Dennis Heimbigner, the active team is composed of the technical team lead, Ward Fisher, Tara Drwenski as the lead developer on netCDF-Java, and our community of developers. Work continues apace, but is largely focused on community building and bug fixing.
NetCDF continues to enjoy a high amount of community engagement, for which we are very grateful. The primary avenues of engagement with the netCDF community are as follows:
The netCDF team continues to represent the netCDF community in the following areas:
We are focused in the short term on the v4.9.3 release of netCDF-C, with accompanying releases of the Fortran and C++ interfaces. This release will improve the documentation and functionality for cloud-based ncZarr storage options in the C library, and expand the interface libraries to allow for the use of these new features. We need to introduce versioning to the netCDF spec, as this is long overdue.
Lack of resources refers to “Not having enough developer hours to address all of the issues which need to be addressed, in parallel”. This leads to triaging issues and figuring out which issues need to be addressed in what order. Even assuming perfect efficiency, the overhead of this sort of project management is in-and-of-itself requires an allocation of resources which would otherwise be spent addressing said issues. The netCDF team does not enjoy perfect project management efficiency.
The reduced resources limit the amount of effort that can go into directly implementing new features in netCDF. Furthermore, time is spent between purely technical tasks and other, equally important but nebulous tasks such as community maintenance and support, project management, and research into emergent technologies and how they can be used to meet the needs of our community.
The following items are prioritized in the medium-to-long term:
Prepared September 2024