[AstroPy] [astropy-dev] ANN: Astropy v0.1

[Olе Streicher]

Dear Astropy developers,

astropy at liska.ath.cx (Olе Streicher) writes:
> * I would volunteer to do the packaging for Debian (and Ubuntu).

I now had some time to look a bit deeper into the packaging of astropy;
<http://git.debian.org/?p=debian-science/packages/python-astropy.git>
is the git repository. The package is not yet ready to use, however.

I have now some questions and comment on the package:

pyfits
======

* Will astropy.io.fits be an integral part of astropy, and pyfits remain
  just as a legacy (just like astropy.wcs resp. pywcs)? Or does astropy
  just include the latest version of pyfits?

* astropy.io.fits also contains some third-party-library code (libz)
  that could be replaced by linking to the library. Many Linux
  distributions unbundle this -- see [1] for Fedora Linux (base of
  Scientific Linux) and [2] for Debian (and Ubuntu). I think that the
  astropy package is a good opportunity to make the code cleaner here
  and move this external code to cextern/ and having some options to use
  external libraries instead (like the wcslib/pywcs issue I already
  mentioned).

Packages
========

* In the moment, I would just build astropy as one large package. I
  think that it does not make sense to split it up into smaller
  packages. The documentation would be separated, however (it is not
  built yet).

* Since also legacy packages for pyfits, pywcs and vo are build (what
  about asciitable?), I would create for each of them a small legacy
  package that depends on the main package and provides the legacy
  namespace. However, the legacy namespace is only installed if the
  original is not found, which makes a package creation a bit
  instable. It would be nice if the legacy package creation could be
  forced even if the original package is installed. I could do this
  however by patching setup_helpers.py.

Best regards

Ole