Official Debian packages for HDF5 are built without support for Fortran 2003; therefore some new features are not available for users of Fortran.

It's a one line change in ./debian/rules; just replace

SERIAL_ONLY_FLAGS = --enable-fortran --enable-threadsafe --enable-cxx

with

SERIAL_ONLY_FLAGS = --enable-fortran --enable-fortran2003 --enable-threadsafe --enable-cxx

The compiled package 1.8.12 from Debian Sid works after recompiling with Debian Sid. For Debian Stable the compilation fails with an error on MPICH:

...
make[3]: Entering directory `/tmp/hdf5-1.8.12+docs/debian/build-mpich/fortran/testpar'
  FC       ptest.o
../../../../fortran/testpar/ptest.f90:23: Error: Can't open included file 'mpif.h'
make[3]: *** [ptest.o] Fehler 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/tmp/hdf5-1.8.12+docs/debian/build-mpich/fortran/testpar'
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Fehler 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/tmp/hdf5-1.8.12+docs/debian/build-mpich/fortran'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Fehler 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/hdf5-1.8.12+docs/debian/build-mpich'
make: *** [build-stamp-mpich] Fehler 2
dpkg-buildpackage: Fehler: Fehler-Exitstatus von debian/rules build war 2
debuild: fatal error at line 1357:

But rebuilding 1.8.8 on Debian Stable with the same correction works as expected. We use these modified packages on our computers with success - but as we are not heavy users of HDF5 experience is limited.

The programme hdf5f2003.f90 tries to write the largest possible 64 bit integer value into the file longint.h5; by calling h5dump afterwards it is possible to verify correctness of this transaction.

• Submitted to https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=libhdf5-dev on [2014-08-20 Mit 09:24].
• Appeared on the bug tracker https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=hdf5 as https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=758694 at [2014-08-20 Mit 10:00:02]