[AstroPy] Including kcorrect as a astropy affiliated package?

[Erik Tollerud]

(Sorry for the delay in responding - AAS was rather hectic...)

> Oh, you've written a wrapper already...  how come I didn't know that!

Probably because I didn't try to advertise it too much given that it
calls IDL via python - that just feels wrong somehow :)


> Right, IDL isn't necessary at all to run the Python version, and
> that's the reason for working on the port.  The original kcorrect
> isn't a very thin wrapper around its C library, so in order to have
> the full functionality that the IDL version currently has, all the
> .pro scripts still need to be translated (I've only done what I have
> needed for myself so far).  But that isn't so bad. (it's just that IDL
> codes are not very fun to read.............)

It's not clear to me that we even want/need to translate many of the
IDL pieces (e.g. all the various survey-specific helper procedures) -
probably just a few functions that do the relatively standard things
is good enough for most purposes.  Eventually it'd be good to include
some an interface that accepts astropy photometry objects or
something.  But given the requisite astropy objects are not
implemented yet, that's probably a ways down the road.


> I browsed through the astropy website and the affiliate thing, hence
> my inquiry.  So I'd happy to contribute the whole thing, according to
> whatever suggestion that astropy community makes.  I'm looking for a
> repository anyways.... it's about 185 MB right now, most auxiliary
> data included.

This is a perfect candidate for the data framework (see the
astropy.config.data package and associated documentation) - you could
include just the code itself in a github repo, and the auxiliary data
can be downloaded directly via URL, and the data package then caches
the download for you and uses the local version on later accesses.
Once we have a data server up and running, I'm sure we could host the
auxiliary data there, as well.



-- 
Erik Tollerud