Some new largish packages: please comment
Hi;
I am about to build some packages of astronomical databases to be used
with Elwood Downey's XEphem, packaged by Frank Jordan for slink. Since
some of these databases are quite large I would like to hear what people
think about a possible split-up. The packages will be part of non-free,
the main reason being the fact that XEphem is in non-free (AFAIKT now, we
could as well put most of them into free but this wouldn't make much sense
since they are useless without XEphem).
The biggest question is whether a huge thing like the Hubble Guide Star
Catalg (GSC) may be put into a Debian package. This catalog lists all
field stars of magnitude 15 and brigher. XEphem will use it in a
compressed format which reduces its size to 160MB. Since this is already
compressed I am speaking of package size as well as installed size!
The other catalogs are minor in size and there is one obvious split-up
into three packages that comes into ones mind:
o The Position and Proper Motion catalog ppm.xe of 8.7M size. Field stars
and their motion ob magnitude 12 and brigher.
o The dim part of Lowell Observatory catalog astorb.dat (or
asteroids_dim.edb in XEphem-jargon), currently 4.3M.
o The additional catalogs that are also not distributed in xephem.tar.gz:
Abell.edb (181k), IC.edb (219k), UGC.edb (354k), bs.edb (257k), cgcg.edb
(1157k), gcvs.edb (1122k), lbn.edb (53k), ldn.edb (81k), pulsars.edb
(27k), qso.edb (454k), sh2.edb (18k), spacecraft.edb (14k), vla20cm.edb
(35k), vla2cm.edb (24k), vla3.7cm.edb (30k), vla6cm (32k), vla90cm.edb
(8k). Altogether, that's about 4.1M.
Frank Jordan suggested to me splitting it up into those three packages
while Elwood Downey thinks we shouldn't care and leave those packages
together as one package of size 17M+ and have one for GSC. Personally, I
like another approach to be described below most but am not sure because
of GSC's size. We also have to keep in mind that the dim asteroids
probably don't make much sense when GSC is absent since all objects in
this catalog can never get brighter than magnitude 13 (the others are
already part of the XEphem package itself).
To wrap things up, there are 5 options:
a) 160M GSC + 8.7M asteroids + 4.3M PPM + 4.1M others
b) 160M GSC + 8.7M asteroids + 8.4M PPM and others <-- nice
c) 160M GSC + 17.1M other catalogs
d) 4.3M PPM + 4.1M others
e) 8.4M PPM and others
of which I prefer the second. Please comment!
Looking forward to hearing from you
-rbk.
--
Richard Kreckel
<Richard.Kreckel@Uni-Mainz.DE>
<http://wwwthep.physik.uni-mainz.de/~kreckel/>
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