[AstroPy] PyRAF 1.0beta available

[Perry Greenfield]

PyRAF version 1.0beta is now available. This version is expected
to be the same as the official release (versions of bundled software
may change). The beta is primarily intended to test the binary
release packaging which should make installation much easier.

PyRAF is a new command language for IRAF based on the Python 
scripting language. It is useful both for interactive data analysis 
and for writing analysis scripts. PyRAF coexists with the current 
IRAF CL; no changes need be (or should be) made to your installed 
IRAF system to use it. PyRAF has been developed by the Science 
Software Group at the Space Telescope Science Institute. 

The next release of STSDAS/TABLES has some applications that require
PyRAF to be installed for their use. Many future applications
developed by the Science Software Group at STScI will require PyRAF
as well.

PyRAF may be installed in one of two ways. Generally users will 
find it far easier to install PyRAF using the binary distribution
if it is available for your platform. The binary distribution includes
all software components needed to run PyRAF (including Python).
If you are not on a platform for which binaries are available, or
you wish to use existing installations of Python or other 
components, it will be necessary to install PyRAF and its necessary
components from the source distributions. Depending on the particular
system, platform and the user's experience with software installations,
this can be significantly more involved. Both kinds of downloads
and the associated instructions are available from links on
http://pyraf.stsci.edu as well as documentation on how to use PyRAF.

Binary downloads have been built on:

Solaris 2.5.1 (should work on all subsequent versions of Solaris as
well)
Solaris 8
OSF v5.1 (Tru64)
Redhat Linux 6.1 
Redhat Linux 7.1 (It may
    also run on other systems similar to Redhat; we are interested in
    which of Linux platforms this binary release does or doesn't work on
    so please let us know of the results of any attempts to run it on
    such variants.)

We hope to eventually have binary distributions for Mac OS X
and perhaps other platforms depending on demand. PyRAF is
not available for Microsoft Windows since IRAF is not available
on that platform. (But other subcomponents such as PyFITS
and numarray are available for Windows.)

Since this release employs a different directory structure than
past beta releases, we recommend that all installations of 
PyRAF 1.0beta be done from scratch, rather than updating an
existing installations of PyRAF. This will make future updates
much simpler.

Please contact help at stsci.edu for help with installation or use.

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