...
However, for building complex software, build-tools like autotools or cmake are used, which come with own rules, how information on to be linked libraries has to be delivered. In turn, the netcdf library uses nc-config and nf-config to deliver the information on the path to the netcdf headers and libraries. All serious build tools use this option and a netcdf-module just needs to deliver the path (PATH) to these tools. Very specific is cmake that searches for libraries instead of requesting information in a well defined way. This does not fit well in the philosophy of environment modules. Hence, there may be cases, where only the documentation on the to be build software helps.
...