Re: debian and astronomy (was: Re: first steps (pcfitsio, pyraf and iraf))
On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 11:59:16AM +0200, Cedric BRINER wrote:
> 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
> > Morning,
> >
> > 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.
>
> >> 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:
> So this should be _the_ steps that has to be ascomplished on the deb wrapper ?
That is the essence of the steps. I'm sure there will be more .. for
example, it should probably try to maintain the conffile setup I have
in /etc/iraf/. (Lets coordinate this package off-list, okay?) You
should probably read my full .diff.gz:
ftp://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/contrib/debian/iraf_current.diff.gz
I have an unreleased version (which I'm not planning on releasing)
which I can review for other changes when your package is started.
> > 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
Its a pretty well-known software package; it does the same thing as
iraf "starfind" and "daofind", but has a better reputation (though it
is not targetted at crowded fields, as is daofind).. Its used by a
number of surveys (such as LONEOS).
> > 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
Thanks; this list is useful to me.
> ds9 http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/ds9/
Done! Waiting for v4 and unobfuscatred source.
--
Clear skies,
Justin
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