Test that checks if nc-config can locate fortran compiler is deprecated in netcdf-c and should be removed

[PatSunter]

Solution to issue cannot be found in the documentation.

• I checked the documentation.

Issue

Hi there -
I have been building this package in a corporate environment - based on this conda-forge recipe but using a custom Intel compiler on our supercomputer.

When running the tests in the conda-forge recipe, I also ran them manually myself to double-check.

I noticed that after installing the package, the test command per these lines in the current meta.yaml:

    # Check that libnetcdf's nc-config finds this package's nf-config
    - test -f $(nc-config --fc)  # [not win]

... that running nc-config --fc did run without error - but produced no output.

When I looked into this on the main NetCDF-C repo which includes nc-config tool, I see this issue Unidata/netcdf-c#2274 and related PR Unidata/netcdf-c#2619 in Feb 2023, where the NetCDF maintainers decided to remove ability from the nc-config tool to check Fortran info using nf-config.

So: I think you should remove that particular test from this repo. You will still have a test of running nf-config directly and checking it's output - which appears to be preferred way for NetCDF source maintainers now to check for successful Fortran install.

Installed packages

#
# Name                    Version                   Build  Channel
_libgcc_mutex             0.1                 conda_forge    conda-forge
_openmp_mutex             4.5                       2_gnu    conda-forge
blosc                     1.21.5               h0f2a231_0    conda-forge
bzip2                     1.0.8                hd590300_5    conda-forge
c-ares                    1.22.1               hd590300_0    conda-forge
ca-certificates           2023.11.17           hbcca054_0    conda-forge
hdf4                      4.2.15               h2a13503_7    conda-forge
hdf5                      1.14.2          mpi_mpich_bom_0    local
icu                       73.2                 h59595ed_0    conda-forge
keyutils                  1.6.1                h166bdaf_0    conda-forge
krb5                      1.21.2               h659d440_0    conda-forge
libaec                    1.1.2                h59595ed_1    conda-forge
libcurl                   8.4.0                hca28451_0    conda-forge
libedit                   3.1.20191231         he28a2e2_2    conda-forge
libev                     4.33                 h516909a_1    conda-forge
libgcc-ng                 13.2.0               h807b86a_3    conda-forge
libgomp                   13.2.0               h807b86a_3    conda-forge
libiconv                  1.17                 h166bdaf_0    conda-forge
libjpeg-turbo             3.0.0                hd590300_1    conda-forge
libnetcdf                 4.9.2           mpi_mpich_bom_0    local
libnghttp2                1.58.0               h47da74e_0    conda-forge
libssh2                   1.11.0               h0841786_0    conda-forge
libstdcxx-ng              13.2.0               h7e041cc_3    conda-forge
libtree                   3.1.1                h166bdaf_0    conda-forge
libxml2                   2.11.6               h232c23b_0    conda-forge
libzip                    1.10.1               h2629f0a_3    conda-forge
libzlib                   1.2.13               hd590300_5    conda-forge
lz4-c                     1.9.4                hcb278e6_0    conda-forge
mpi                       1.0                       mpich    conda-forge
mpich                     3.3.2            external_bom_0    local
ncurses                   6.4                  h59595ed_2    conda-forge
netcdf-fortran            4.6.1           mpi_mpich_bom_0    local
openssl                   3.1.4                hd590300_0    conda-forge
snappy                    1.1.10               h9fff704_0    conda-forge
xz                        5.2.6                h166bdaf_0    conda-forge
zlib                      1.2.13               hd590300_5    conda-forge
zstd                      1.5.5                hfc55251_0    conda-forge

Environment info

N/A, not relevant to my issue report.

[xylar]

@PatSunter, thanks for reporting this!

I'll try to remember to do this the next time we update the package for other reasons, but it seems like it's probably overkill to create new packages (and bump the build number) just for this fix on its own.

Thanks again!