First contact with pupynere

Pierre-Yves David — 2009-11-06T17:36-01:00

I spent some time this week evaluating Pupynere, the PUre PYthon NEtcdf REader written by Roberto De Almeida. I see several advantages in pupynere.

First it's a pure Python module with no external dependency. It doesn't even depend on the NetCDF lib and it is therefore very easy to deploy.

Second, it offers the same interface as Scientific Python's NetCDF bindings which makes transitioning from one module to another very easy.

Third pupynere is being integrated into Scipy as the scypi.io.netcdf module. Once integrated, this could ensure a wide adoption by the python community.

Finally it's easy to dig in this clear and small code base of about 600 lines. I have just sent several fixes and bug reports to the author.

However pupynere isn't mature yet. First it seems pupynere has been only used for simple cases so far. Many common cases are broken. Moreover there is no support for new NetCDF formats such as long-NetCDF and NetCDF4, and important features such as file update are still missing. In addition, The lack of a test suite is a serious issue. In my opinion, various bugs could already have been detected and fixed with simple unit tests. Contributions would be much more comfortable with the safety net offered by a test suite. I am not certain that the fixes and improvements I made this week did not introduce regressions.

To conclude, pupynere seems too young for production use. But I invite people to try it and provide feedback and fixes to the author. I'm looking forward to using this project in production in the future.

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First contact with pupynere