[AstroPy] Deployment and packaging

[Prasanth]

Hello,

I strongly agree with Matt Davis and Thomas Robitaille here.

Many of the packages like asciidata, vo.table, ATpy, APLpy, stsci_python
etc., are easier to install, if we have a distribution that satisfies the
basic requirements.

Right now I think the easiest way for a non expert person with no root
access to quickly get started with using Python, is by first downloading
EPD/Python(x,y) and then the astronomy package of interest. If there is an
EPD like free package with most of the core dependencies, not specifically
astronomy related, then it might be easier for a wider range of non expert
users to get started easily.

As Matt points out, this could possibly help other user communities as well.

Prasanth

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 7:00 AM, Matt Davis <mrdavis at stsci.edu> wrote:

> I can see that there seems to be substantial interest in producing an easy
> Python installation usable by astronomers. Something like EPD but free, or
> maybe like Python(x,y) for Windows. In fact, there's no reason something
> like that needs to be specific to astronomy. All the tools you list would be
> great for someone in geoscience, medicine, engineering, or many other
> fields. I think it would be fantastic if we could fill this need, but I
> don't think it's a need specific to astronomy and for that reason it should
> be a separate project from AstroPy (with substantial staff overlap, to be
> sure). I have worked in Earth sciences and they face the same challenges to
> Python adoption that astronomers do. And there is much to be gained by
> helping other fields join the Python fold, especially when it comes to
> things like handling large data sets, statistics, pipelines, parallel
> processing, imaging, etc.
>
> AstroPy, I think, should be a project separate from being packaged with
> anything else. It can have dependencies, of course, and some modules may
> have more dependencies than others, but the fact would be that someone could
> install AstroPy tools into a Python environment they made themselves, into
> stsci_python, into EPD, into some Python distribution we (as a community)
> make, or into any other Python environment that supports our distribution
> method.
>
> - Matt
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