problem loading silo files in paraview using [email protected] etc

[biddisco]

A user experienced problems loading a silo file using the most recent paraview, A related issue is here which reproduces the same problem AFAICT https://gitlab.kitware.com/paraview/paraview/-/issues/22373

I tried rolling back to older version of paraview, but it turns out that hdf5 is the problem rather than paraview itself.

After some debugging I discover that the use of H5_USE_16_API might be the cause in newer silo versions. When opening silo files, all information appears to be read successfully, but there might be an issue handling strings in the newer HDF5 versions as it appears some are corrupted/wrong when the silo file is traversed by the paraview/visitbridge/silo reader. I stepped through with the debugger to located the guilty code, but after finding that using older [email protected] solved our immediate problem, I patched our build and moved on, but would like to investigate further. I found that [email protected] and [email protected] worked, but am not confident that any combination of newer hdf5 or silo are ok.

I'm filing this issue with this little information in case a silo developer has time to look at it before I do.