[AstroPy] [pywcs] Unit question

[Marshall Perrin]

On Apr 5, 2011, at 4:18 AM, Ole Streicher wrote:
> I am still quite confused why there are parallel packages doing mainly
> the same thing: astLib and astrolib are quite for the same purpose, and
> having both f.e. a wcslib wrapper. In my opinion, this parallel
> development seems to me quite unnecessary and delays cooperation since
> everyone historically uses his own preferred library. For different
> programming languages, I could understand this, but I dont see a real
> reason to have different pywcs modules.
> 
> Are there any attempts to unify the different approaches for
> astro(python|lib)? What is the common opinion about the fragmentation
> problem?

This is not a new concern (see http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/astropy/2009-June/000841.html ) , but it seems that the community is still lacking sufficient impetus to make any unification/simplification a real priority.  Hopefully with time, though...

 - Marshall