[AstroPy] Ubuntu packages and state of AstroLib

[Ole Streicher]

Dear list,

I could successfully build packages of pywcs for Ubuntu. They are in my
repository (read on there on how to add it to your system):

https://launchpad.net/~olebole/+archive/astro

Because of the naming conventions of Ubuntu, the package is renamed to
"python-pywcs".

The source (version 1.9-4.4.4) is taken from stsci, as in the Fedora
package made by Sergio Pascual. BTW, this version isn't tagged in the
astrolib SVN repository, is it?

I also used Sergio's patch to link to the existing libwcs instead of
using the builtin one. Since the current libwcs (version 4.7) is used, I
needed to remove the underscore in wcsset_() to avoid linkage problems.
The repository also contains an Ubuntu package of the libwcs.

Packages are available in 32 bit (i386) and 64 bit (amd64) for the 10.04
LTS version (Lucid Lynx) as well as for the current 10.10 version
(Maverick Meercat). I will create packages for the upcoming 11.04 (Natty
Narwhal) when they reach the Beta testing phase.

The main problem for me here is testing: I found only some test code in
the astropy subversion repository of pywcs, without documentation, and
probably using some features that are not available in pywcs-1.9:
UnitConverter, and find_all_wcs(). Also, the test code seem to be not
use Pythons "unittest" package?

Comments and bug reports on the builds are very welcome.

Cheers

Ole