[AstroPy] A quick survey of PyFITS users

[Erik Bray]

Thanks Tom,

Regarding documentation, I've been working on sphinx versions of the 
users guide (the Handbook) and the the API docs.  It still needs some 
work, but it's mostly usable :)

I have the latest version of the docs uploaded at 
http://packages.python.org/pyfits/, which will be kept up to date.  It 
will also be hosted a the URL you pointed out, but I don't know how to 
put anything on that web server yet.  (Worth mentioning also is that 
pyfits itself can be downloaded from PyPI now: 
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyfits).

In the future I can try to make these docs easier to find.  And I agree, 
it would be good to add the release date to the docs.

Erik

On 05/26/2011 08:54 AM, Tom Aldcroft wrote:
> Hi Erik,
>
> Congratulations on the new 3.0 release and the Python 3 compatibility!
>   This is good news for PyFITS users and the Python community.  I just
> have some documentation requests:
>
> - Could you put a link to the API docs on the main page or somewhere
> obvious?  I never even knew they existed online until I just googled
> "pyfits api".
>
> - The current online API docs refer to version 2.2.2, not 2.4.0.
> Since this is a widely used package, it might be worth the effort to
> host API docs for all releases, e.g.
> http://stsdas.stsci.edu/stsci_python_epydoc/pyfits/2.4.0/index.html.
>
> - Could you put a version number in the PyFITS Handbook in addition to
> a release date?
>
> - Is there any chance of making an online HTML version of the PyFITS
> Handbook instead of only PDF?  For me, HTML would be much easier to
> use and I wouldn't end up with 10 copies of the manual sitting in my
> downloads directory.
>
> Thanks,
> Tom
>
> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 7:11 PM, Erik Bray<embray at stsci.edu>  wrote:
>> Dear AstroPy community,
>>
>>      Obviously, if you're not a PyFITS user you can skip this :)  As
>> some of you know I've been working on the next version of PyFITS, which
>> will hopefully be released within the next couple months.  I've called
>> it version 3.0 for two primary reasons:  It's the first version to
>> support Python 3, and it contains a pretty large overhaul to the source
>> code.
>>
>>      Despite the large changes, I've tried, at least for this release,
>> to maintain as much backwards-compatibility as possible with the last
>> release (2.4.0).  So most users hopefully shouldn't even notice much of
>> a difference.  I've already had a handful of unofficial beta-testers.
>> They've been very helpful in helping me squash some bugs, but haven't
>> otherwise pointed out any serious API incompatibilities.
>>
>>      However, there are some large changes to the 'private' API
>> (anything prefixed with an underscore), as well as to a few nominally
>> 'public' methods, but that aren't of much use to most users.  In
>> addition, there are a few interfaces that are still supported, but that
>> I would like to deprecate.
>>
>>      So I just wanted to try to get a sense of what interfaces users are
>> actually using, and if anybody is likely to experience significant
>> difficulties with this new version.  Here are my questions:
>>
>> 1) Are you using any 'private' variables, classes, functions, etc. from
>> PyFITS?  That is, is your code using anything imported from pyfits that
>> begins with an underscore?
>>
>> 2) Do you use the classExtensions feature at all?
>>
>> 3) Do you have any custom subclasses of any classes in pyfits?
>>
>> 4) Do you use the _ValidHDU.req_cards() method or the Card.fromstring()
>> method at all?
>>
>> 5) Are there any other odd PyFITS interfaces you directly access that
>> are not documented in the PyFITS Users' Manual?
>>
>>
>> I hope to deal with as many problems as I can now, so as to not get
>> inundated with "bug" reports once users switch to this new version.  Of
>> course, not everybody who uses PyFITS is on this mailing list, and that
>> will probably happen anyways.  But any information I can gather to
>> mitigate that will be greatly helpful.
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Erik
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