cosmdist

[Boud Roukema <boud-debian@cosmo.torun.pl>]

hi Debian-astro

I've developed a package - cosmdist - which someone enthusiastic
might want to consider debianising. That was actually my original
long-term aim, but I haven't learnt how to do debian packaging, and at
least on any short time scale, I'm unlikely to.

The package is GPL'd (v2+) and written by me alone (so corrections to
satisfy the debian guidelines should be easy if necessary). What it
does is in principle simple - cosmological distance-redshift-time
relations in the family of cosmological models without structure
formation (the FLRW models), including the standard (LCDM) model
(which assumes that structure formation is gravitationally decoupled
from expansion and avoids Einstein's equation). In principle, all
that's needed is a 1D numerical integral, and this is probably coded
into several widely used cosmology packages - though many of which are
"publicly available" with ... a non-free licence - and the aims are
probably complementary.

My aim is to have a fast C core library, usable as any of:

* a C core library, or
* a command-line frontend, in typical shell style, or
* a fortran library (wrapper to the C library).

(Other wrappers, e.g. octave, python, should be straightforward.)

The advantage of a command line tool is to play with files using
awk and sed and to be able to pipe redshifts, distances or ages
through cosmdist and e.g. graph (in the plotutils package), for
rapid initial analysis of extragalactic datasets.

I've been using this for over a decade, as archive.org probably
knows from here:

  http://cosmo.torun.pl/GPLdownload/dodec/

making only minor changes. Probably several dozens of users should
have reported any bugs that they found; the number who actually would
have reported bugs is, of course, much smaller :). The chances of the
package containing a serious bug are probably not so high; possibly
user friendliness might need the most development. There is a .texinfo
page.

I've uploaded cosmdist to a git repository at

  https://bitbucket.org/broukema/cosmdist

so it can be git pulled with:

  git clone https://bitbucket.org/broukema/cosmdist

I'd be happy to work with anyone interested in debianising this and
getting it into debian-astro (getting it into stretch would be really
cool, but require hard, fast work...).

At least under command line operation, this is valgrind-clean for me
using --leak-check=full --show-reachable=yes (38 Mb are allocated and
freed). I don't have experience in terms of scanf buffer overflow
exploits, so someone with experience should feel free to check - this is
only for reading numerical values on the command line.

Cheers
Boud