NCAR / ncl

The NCAR Command Language (NCL) is a scripting language for the analysis and visualization of climate and weather data.

Home Page:http://www.ncl.ucar.edu

Geek Repo:Geek Repo

Github PK Tool:Github PK Tool

Incompatibility with new version of XQuartz (v2.8.5)?

mdtoyNOAA opened this issue · comments

screenshot
Describe the bug
Since the latest update of XQuartz for Mac OSX, I have been unable to plot from NCL scripts to an X11 window. I will describe the behavior on two machines:

  1. My "work" laptop connected to a remote HPC server -- the plot begins to draw, but does not complete. Note that I can plot to pdf, png, etc. files, but not to an X11 window.
  2. My "home" laptop trying to plot locally -- launching NCL gives the error message:
    dyld: Library not loaded: /opt/X11/lib/libcairo.2.dylib
    Referenced from : /opt/local/bin/ncl
    Reason: Incompatible library version: ncl requires version 11203.0.0 or later, but libcairo.2.dylib provides version 1.0.0
    Abort

In both cases, the problem started with the latest update to XQuartz version 2.8.5.

Provide the following:
(Files listed below are tarred and zipped in attached tgz file)

  • a concise NCL script: "plot_du3_oblcol_lat_profile_simple.ncl"
  • necessary data files: "avg_du3_oblcol_bar.lndmsk.nc"
  • relevant graphical output: what the plot should look like: "du3_oblcol_emc_drag.pdf"

Computing environment

  • OS: MacOS and Linux (HPC)
  • OS version: Catalina
  • NCL Version: 6.6.2
  • Installation method: Both binary from NCAR website and conda

Additional context
Again, the problem seems to be related to latest update of XQuartz to version 2.8.5.
files.tgz

Thank you, Rick. It is similar to my issue, except that the partially drawn plot is always the same, that is it stops drawing at the same point, not at random places. Also, the GPU on my laptop is an Apple chip. Up until last week, before the XQuartz update, I was able to plot to X11 with no problems.
I'm going to add a screenshot of the partially drawn plot to the issue.

-- Mike

As I said on ncl-talk, this is a known problem with the XQuartz 2.8.5 release. It is affecting other X11 software, not just NCL. The suggested workaround is to back down to 2.8.4, until the problem is resolved. Also it looks like the XQuartz developers are actively working on this.

XQuartz/XQuartz#323