[AstroPy] Proliferating py-astro-libs

[Tommy Grav]

I think this discussion is very good. As an astronomer that does most of my 
programming in Python it certainly would be easier to contribute effort to 
a project that have some more unified community support similar to scipy  
and numpy. 

One quick question. I have not looked at pyRAF in a while, but it still is only
a wrapper of the IRAF routines, right? Has anyone considered migrating away
from the IRAF backend to build pure python or C/Fortran wrapped packages
of the same routines? To me the installation of of IRAF and then pyRAF on top
of that has always been a barrier I never have quite made it through. I know
that one can install the Stsci package, but last time I looked it installs itself
on the root directory and consists of way to much non-python related stuff.
I find that hard to deal with as I as a mac-user use Activestate python with
the framework structure, which to me is very clean and easy to keep organized.

Cheers
   Tommy