Comment (by Roland Haas):

I am trying to come up with a better way to handle this is in the branch rhaas/strip-dirs of the flesh but the changes are bit too invasive to put them in just before the release and there will be use visible changes, though I believe the changes are towards the "fewer surprises" direction which I would think are acceptable.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2235/externallibraries-hdf5-fails-to-correctly