Initialize members of vldata to make sure that nc_free_vlens() succeeds. See #527.

[ckhroulev]

Note that free(NULL) is a no-op.

[jswhit]

Could @dopplershift 's test from issue #527 be added to tst_vlen.py along with a Changelog entry?

[ckhroulev]

@jswhit Absolutely!

[ckhroulev]

Note that Travis CI uses NetCDF 4.1.1 while AppVeyor has 4.3.3.1.

I'll post an update once I have more info. (I'll have to install NetCDF and HDF5 versions matching ones used by Travis CI scripts.)

[jswhit]

4.3 can be installed in travis ci trusty

https://launchpad.net/~heiko-klein/+archive/ubuntu/netcdf

[jswhit]

The travis tests still fail even with hdf5-1.8.15-patch1 and necdf-4.4.0 (see pull request #606).

Works fine for me on OSX. Maybe it's related to the compiler toolchain?

[jswhit]

I'd like to go ahead and merge this, since it is the right thing to do. Let's just disable the test for right now until we figure out why it fails on Ubuntu.

[ckhroulev]

@jswhit If I understand this correctly, the test I added will fail with NetCDF versions < 4.4.1 (see Unidata/netcdf-c#221). I have no idea why it passed on AppVeyor (I blame it on the undefined behavior of memcpy when one of the pointer arguments is null).

[jswhit]

Let's wrap the test with if __netcdf4libversion__ > '4.4.0' then.

[ckhroulev]

@jswhit Regarding turning the test off for NetCDF < 4.4.1: I did this already (please see the code).

(One of AppVeyor checks failed during "git clone". The rest passed, skipping this test, as expected.)

[jswhit]

OK, great. Merging now then.