[MOAB-dev] Problems with MOAB not finding hdf5

[Jason Kraftcheck]

Tim Tautges wrote:
> Jason, is there any way of checking for that library before checking for
> hdf5?  Or, do we not want to do that because we might have a
> locally-built hdf5 w/o szip?
> 

SZIP is not free, HDF5 libraries shipped by linux distributions are built
w/out it, etc.  So I think it will be common enough that people won't have it.

The way the configure script works now is to:
  a) try linking with HDF5 library to verify that it is link-able
  b) if that fails, try again with "-lszip"
This will fairly robustly determine if the HDF5 library is usable.  The
failure was in no way unique to MOAB.  If you download pre-compiled HDF5
libraries and don't have libszip, then it will not be possible to link those
HDF5 libraries into any application (they're broken.)

If MOAB users frequently encounter this error, it might be helpful to print
a more informative diagnostic.  I'm not familiar with any autoconf mechanism
to test for required libraries if those libraries are not present on the
system (i.e. any way other than how we do it know.)  I could spend some time
trying to come up with a portable method of doing so if you think this is
important.

- jason