wishlist: idl/gdl-written software

[Sylwester Arabas <sarabas@igf.fuw.edu.pl>]

Package: gnudatalanguage
Severity: wishlist

Dear All,

As a follow-up from a recent discussion at the GDL workshop in Paris, 
I'd like to ask for any possibilities of shipping idl/gdl-written 
software in Debian.

A flagship example is the NASA Astronomy Library written in IDL but 
released as free and open source software under the BSD-2 license, see:
http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Could it (or a subset of its routines) be packaged in Debian? I guess 
that a lot of GDL users do expect the FITS i/o functionality 
out-of-the-box - having idlastro package as a dependency would allow it.

Other IDL/GDL-written candidates for packaging would include:
- MPFIT (actually a dependency of idlastro)
  http://www.physics.wisc.edu/~craigm/idl/fitting.html
- Coyote library (also a dependency of idlastro)
  http://www.idlcoyote.com/documents/programs.php
- TeX2IDL
  http://physics.mnstate.edu/craig/textoidl/

To sum up, pending support from Debian-Astro (I'm not an astronomer) I 
suggest extending the GDL package wishlist with at least idlastro-fitsio 
package.

Comments welcome!

Thanks,
Sylwester

--
http://www.igf.fuw.edu.pl/~slayoo/