I’m using h5diff 1.10.4 to compare two HDF5 files which have dimension scales. What I’m noticing is that h5diff seems to be walking the REFERENCE_LIST attribute values and comparing the datasets referred to by the references. This is unnecessary and unwanted–the references are to objects in the two files which will be compared as datasets independently and thus this is a duplicate comparison.
Is there any way to control this? The references should be compared in this case, but not the referents–at least not by dereferencing the reference itself, but by looking at the dataset. Use cases where the referents should be compared probably exist, but I doubt they are common.
Also the output is incomplete. We the referent is compared I get this:
attribute: <REFERENCE_LIST of </DimAcrossTrack>> and <REFERENCE_LIST of </DimAcrossTrack>>
size: [5x3x101x266] [5x3x101x266]
position difference
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 0 0 0 179 ] 0.228157 0.228157 2.77556e-17
[ 0 0 5 194 ] 0.239138 0.239138 2.77556e-17
[ 0 0 10 249 ] 0.196291 0.196291 2.77556e-17
Which tells me the name of the attribute (REFERENCE_LIST), the dataset to which it is attached (DimAcrossTrack), and the shape of the object being compared; but the attribute value is a one dimensional array of references and I never see the element number or its value which holds the reference that causes the differences to be printed.