Re: debian and astronomy (was: Re: first steps (pcfitsio, pyraf and iraf))
On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 11:19:29AM -0400, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2005 at 09:04:57AM -0400, Kevin B. McCarty wrote:
> > Cedric BRINER wrote:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'm working as a sysadmin at the Geneva Observatory and we do need
> > > some softwares which are not provided by the debian distribution. So
> > > I thought that it will be a good idea to do this job well once and to
> > > give this back to the debian community.
> > >
> > > the software that I'm willing to package are: pcfitsio, pyraf, iraf
> >
> > IIRC, Justin Pryzby (justinpryzby at users.sourceforge.net) has made
> > unofficial packages of at least IRAF. There have been some possible
> > copyright issues with the package. You should probably coordinate work
> > on packaging IRAF with him, especially since he owns the open ITP:
> Morning,
>
> Yes, IRAF has issues; the main CL parser is copyright Stephen C.
> Johnson; I believe its ripped from 1970s unix YACC.
> (./iraf-2.12.2a/unix/boot/xyacc/README; the copyright listed in the
> *.c files here were apparently mass-added by NOAO, inaccurately).
>
> I don't anticipate seeing IRAF included by Debian anytime soon.
> Creating packages isn't that bad, the worst part is doing some strange
> things to get it to compile (and, were I to spend more time on the
> iraf packages, I would probably NOT compile from source, but write a
> wget wrapper for the binaries provided by upstream, since I'm not able
> to get shared libraries working with iraf's present "memory
> management" scheme in conflict with my kernel's MM scheme). There is
> involving relocation of ~5 conffiles to /etc/, splitting between
> /usr/lib/iraf/ and /usr/share/iraf/ ... nothing terrible here.
sounds good to do an wrapper which will download iraf
(like do flashplugin-nonfree). So I think that I'll go this way.
mentors: do you see any reason do not go this way ?
> But IMHO the iraf system is ill-designed by today's standards. I have
> just uploaded a page about this:
>
> http://justinpryzby.com/astro/code/iraf.html
This is exactly what I've heard from the other sysadmin guy after
showing him your email.
> http://justinpryzby.com/astro/code/libastro.html
we have heard about this, but the astronomer still want to use iraf.
>> I don't expect that you're going to be able to convince your
> observers/data analysts to use anything but iraf. So I suggest my
> 3-step Hacker's Installation Procedure for Iraf:
unfortunately
> Download as.pcix.gen.gz, ib.lnux.x86.gz, nb.lnux.x86.gz, and
> extract them as follows:
>
> Extract this To here
> -------------------------------
> as.pcix.gen.gz ./iraf/
> ib.lnux.x86.gz ./irafbin/bin.linux/
> nb.lnux.x86.gz ./irafbin/noao.bin.linux/
> ib.lnux.x86.gz ./irafbin/bin.linux/
> nb.lnux.x86.gz ./irafbin/noao.bin.linux/
>
> The root directory ("./") is arbitrary; for this type of installation,
> I suggest /opt/iraf/ or /usr/local/iraf/; /usr/iraf/ and /iraf/ are
> other possibilities (but don't fit into the standard hierarchy as
> nicely).
>
> You must edit ./iraf/unix/hlib/libc/iraf.h with the chosen
> installation path and create a symlink:
>
> /usr/include/iraf.h => ./iraf/unix/hlib/libc/iraf.h
>
> That's enough to run ./irafbin/bin.linux/cl.e, and probably do most
> analysis but you should run the full install script to do other stuff
> too (edit other files, set up networking, make symlinks in /usr/bin/,
> etc.):
>
> ./iraf/unix/hlib/install
>
> (This is the part that scares most people, but I save it for last, since it
> doesn't seem to be necessary for most things).
So this should be _the_ steps that has to be ascomplished on the deb wrapper ?
> Lastly, Florian Ernst kindly sponsored my sextractor package last
> week; it is now waiting in the new queue. ds9 is already available in
> Debian (though it won't be for much longer if upstream doesn't provide
> unobfuscated source in their v4 release).
wow, I'll have some conversation with the astronomers to see if they're
interested on this sextractor
> Iraf aside, what software do your astronomers need? And, what iraf
> tasks do they use?
I've made a small turn of everyones here and ask them which part of iraf and
which softwares to they used and which softwares
iraf:
----
Photometric's Reduction Visible/IR
Spectroscopic's Reduction
Spectroscopic's Analysis
Galactic Profile Adjustement
softwares:
---------
midas http://www.eso.org/projects/esomidas/
giraffe http://girbldrs.sourceforge.net/
SuperMongo http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~rhl/sm/
ds9 http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/ds9/
skycat http://archive.eso.org/skycat/
mathematica http://www.wolfram.com/
maple http://www.maplesoft.com/
yorick http://sourceforge.net/projects/yorick-mb/
R http://www.r-project.org/
idl http://www.rsinc.com/
fits:
dfits http://archive.eso.org/saft/dfits/
iraf http://iraf.noao.edu/
pyraf see below python
iraf http://iraf.noao.edu/
pyraf see below python
pyfits see below python
library:
slalib http://star-www.rl.ac.uk/star/docs/sun67.htx/sun67.html
plotting:
xmgrace http://plasma-gate.weizmann.ac.il/Grace/
python http://www.python.org
pcftisio http://panoramix.stsci.edu/~npirzkal/python/pcfitsio/index.html
biggles http://biggles.sourceforge.net/
libdislin
matplotlib http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/
pytfits http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyfits
pyraf http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyraf
scipy http://www.scipy.org/
numeric
numarray
> Clear skies,
> Justin
Ced.
--
Cedric BRINER
Geneva - Switzerland
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